Title: Views and Reviews,
First and Second Series
Author: Havelock Ellis
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Views and Reviews,

First and Second Series

by

Havelock Ellis

A Selection of Uncollected Articles
1884-1932

Boston and New York
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1932

PREFACE

IN these volumes are brought together a collection of essays,
reviews, and some minor writings, covering a period of forty-eight
years, from 1884 to 1932. They are not to be regarded as merely the
sweepings of a literary workshop, for they are carefully selected
from a larger mass of writings as having some kind of interest,
either in relation to the time when they were written or in
relation to to-day. They are so various in character that they
could not easily be classified, and the order in which they here
appear is chronological. What they have in common is that it has
never proved possible to fit any of them into my books, so that,
for the most part, they have been reprinted for the first time.

They are reprinted as they were originally printed. A few slight
and unimportant omissions have been made, but not a word has been
added, nor has a word been changed (except by the correction of
misprints), even when details are obviously far out of date. It is
indeed because a document "dates" that it becomes interesting. I
feel, for my own part, the less desire to make any changes since,
so far as substance and spirit are concerned, I still find myself
nearly always at one even with the earliest of the writings
included in these series.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

CONTENTS

FIRST SERIES 1884-1920I. WOMEN AND SOCIALISM
II. THE PRESENT POSITION OF ENGLISH CRITICISM
III. "TOWARDS DEMOCRACY"
IV. A NOTE ON PAUL BOURGET
V. THE PLACE OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN MEDICAL EDUCATION
VI. THE ANCESTRY OF GENIUS
VII. AN OPEN LETTER TO BIOGRAPHERS
VIII. THE MEN OF CORNWALL
IX. SOEUR JEANNE DES ANGES
X. "THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY"
XI. THE GENIUS OF NIETZSCHE
XII. A DUTCH TOLSTOY
XIII. BROWNING'S PLACE IN LITERATURE
XIV. FICTION IN THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH
XV. BOVARYISM
XVI. THE GENIUS OF FRANCE
XVII. THE PROPHET SHAW
XVIII. ANOTHER PROPHET: H. G. WELLS
XIX. FARE AND WELFARE
XX. FOREL ON THE SEXUAL QUESTION
XXI. INSANITY AND THE LAW
XXII. LETTER TO A SUFFRAGETTE
XXIII. THE CARE OF THE UNBORN
XXIV. BLASCO IBANEZ
XXV. "THE INTERMEDIATE TYPES AMONG PRIMITIVE FOLK"
XXVI. THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT
XXVII. GERMAN POLITICAL IDEALS
XXVIII. THE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF WESTERN EUROPE
XXIX. THE BIOLOGY OF WAR
XXX. RELIGION AND SEX
XXXI. UNLOCKING THE HEART OF GENIUS
XXXII. THE PROGRESS OF CRIMINOLOGY
SECOND SERIES 1920-1932I. LIFE IN ATHENS
II. THE IDEA or PROGRESS
III. THE WORLD'S RACIAL PROBLEM
IV. THE NOVELIST TURNED BIOLOGIST
V. THE RELIGION OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
VI. SCIENCE AND INSPIRATION
VII. THE PLACE OF REASON
VIII. THE ISLAMIC REFORMATION
IX. THE PROBLEM OF CHILDLESS MARRIAGE
X. POPULATION AND EVOLUTION
XI. THE CONTEMPORARY PRESS
XII. KROPOTKIN
XIII. PHILOSOPHERS ON SHOW
XIV. A NOTE ON CONRAD
XV. THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
XVI. ROMAIN ROLLAND
XVII. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCES
XVIII. MORAL CRITICISM
XIX. THE PRIMITIVE SOUL
XX. BRIFFAULT'S "THE MOTHERS"
XXI. AN INQUIRY INTO MARRIAGE
XXII. THOMAS HARDY AND THE HUMAN PAIR
XXIII. THE PROPOSAL TO LEGALISE STERILISATION: A CRITICISM
XXIV. THE PHILOSOPHIC PROBLEM OF SEX
XXV. THE FUTURE OF RELIGION
XXVI. THE EONIST
XXVII. CREATING A NEW SPAIN

FIRST SERIES 1884-1920

Hawkes Point, Carbis Bay, 1897.

I. WOMEN AND SOCIALISM

This article appeared in TO-DAY for October, 1884, as by H.
Havelock Ellis. TO-DAY was then edited by H. H. Champion, Labour
and Socialist leader, and in it Bernard Shaw's early novel, AN
UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST, was then coming out as a serial. My paper here
appears as originally printed, except that I have restored a phrase
concerning "the charming naivete of a modern Isaiah," which
Champion—whether out of consideration for Bebel or for Isaiah
I now knotv not—had deleted.

AUGUST BEBEL, whom it is unnecessary to introduce to the readers
of To-day, has lately written a book in which he endeavours
to set forth the position which women will occupy when society
shall have been "socialised." Die Frau in der Vergangenheit,
Gegenwart und Zukunft deals a little with the past, a very
little with the future, much with the present. Beginning with a
brief historical sketch, Bebel treats of the sexual instinct, of
marriage as it at present exists, of the numerical proportion of
the sexes, of prostitution as a necessary element in the present
system, of the industrial position of women and their intellectual
capacity as compared with men, of their legal position, and of
their relation to politics. There are also some chapters of a
purely Socialist character, with one on over-population. It will be
seen, therefore, that this book, succeeds in covering, however
imperfectly, a very large field. In so far as it is a record of
historical facts it shows to some extent the influence of that
method which a German writer generally adopts when he comes in
contact with facts, probably to escape from those tendencies which
most easily beset him in thought. That is to say, he plunges them
all into his book together, in a fit of fine careless rapture,
trusting, apparently, that by some process of natural selection,
the fittest will ultimately somehow float up to the surface. At the
same time Bebel fails to adopt this method quite stringently;
perhaps he is scarcely at home as a recorder of scientific facts.
An English critic has, however, little right to judge
hypercritically a work on this subject, for we in England have
produced scarcely any contributions of value to the scientific
literature of woman. It may be that that charming prudery which has
distinguished our nation during this century, but perhaps not
before, and which has proved so delightful and so strange to French
visitors, from Madame de Stael and De Stendhal down to Taine and
Max O'Rell, has stood in the way of any frank and precise treatment
of this subject. Certainly, even so grave an historian as W. E. H.
Lecky, who at the end of his History of European Morals has
inserted a chapter on the position of women, cannot speak of some
of the most important questions that affect women without a
wearisome and almost offensive iteration of apologies. And in the
English translation of so learned a work as Max Duncker's
History of Antiquity—published in six large volumes at
I am not certain how many guineas—it has been found advisable
to omit passages which, it is assumed, are unsuited for the modest
English student of civilisation. A similarly uncalled for process
of excision was adopted in the editing of Buckle's Commonplace
Book. Bebel's book may be found of value because it presents in
a clear and outspoken, if rather rough and extreme form, what are,
I conceive, certain distinct tendencies of modern feeling in regard
to women; and an English translation would deserve a welcome.

The old question that moved men's minds was of religion. Now
that "for the first time in the world," as Mill said, "men and
women are really companions" there comes before us, with the larger
issues of social reorganisation, a new and definite question, the
"woman question" with all the economical, social and ethical
problems that centre round that question. If we have not yet
settled the religious question, we are at least on the way to its
settlement; we have caught a glimpse of new ideals and the old
crusade of mere destructive energy has been rendered unnecessary.
It is true that, like a whale's teeth that have no longer any
useful function to perform, a few enthusiasts still survive to
raise the outworn warcries and tilt courageously against the
corpses and ghosts of faith. But putting these aside, as well as
those ardent young people who have not yet emerged from their
Sturm und Drang period, and for whom orthodoxy is still a
very real foe, there are no longer any signs worth heeding to show
that the religious question is still attracting the energy which it
formerly absorbed. There are other problems now which slowly but
very surely approach us, and round the woman question in its
largest sense one of the next great fights will centre. Bebel's
fundamental assertion seems to be that the woman question can only
be solved in the solution of the larger social question.

Now there are at present, as he tells us in his Introduction,
two schools of thought regarding this question. According to the
first there is no woman question; nature has called woman to be a
mother and a wife and has made the home her peculiar sphere. For
the champions on this side, the argument is a very simple one, and
they appear to be little troubled when told that millions of women
are not in a position to follow this so-called command of nature
and bear children and look after households, and that other
millions, to whom this avocation has been vouchsafed, have dragged
wearily through lives that have been as the lives of slaves. But
there is another school that cannot shut its eyes and ears to these
facts. It admits the inferior position of women when the general
development of the race is considered, and that it is necessary to
improve the condition of those who, not having reached the haven of
marriage, are thrown upon their own resources. Those who belong to
this school desire that all occupations for which woman's strength
and capacity are adapted should be thrown open to her, so that she
may enter into competition with man; that she should be permitted
to follow art, science, medicine. A small minority also demand
political rights. But Bebel points out that not only would this
agitation, if successful, simply serve to make competition rage
more fiercely and so lower the income of both sexes, but that it is
partial, being, indeed, chiefly carried on by women of the higher
classes, who only perceive the special needs of the women among
whom they live. The dominion of one sex over another, the material
dependence of the vast majority of women, and their consequent
slavery either through our present marriage system or prostitution,
would remain unchanged.

Into these two classes Bebel finds Germany divided on the woman
question, and it is possible that even in England—the
Paradise of women as it was called three hundred years
ago—there are not wanting representatives of these views. It
is in opposition to both schools that Bebel sets forth the
individualist—or, as he prefers to call it,
Socialist—proposition that "a Woman has the same right to
develop her mental and physical capacities that a man has." This is
not possible—and here we touch the central point of Bebel's
book—in the present condition of society. "The full and
complete solution of the woman question—by which must be
understood not merely equality in the face of the law, but economic
freedom and independence, and, so far as possible, equality in
mental culture—is, under the present social and political
arrangements, as impossible as the solution of the labour
question."

Bebel endeavours to trace this out through several chapters of
his book. Marriage and prostitution are the obverse and reverse of
the sexual relations as at present constituted. And while marriage
on the one hand oppresses the unmarried woman, it equally oppresses
the married woman, prostitution affecting both. The married woman,
Bebel considers, is regarded as, above all, a mere object of
enjoyment; she is economically dependent; she is made to be a
mother and an educator, the most difficult of all positions, when
she has not been in the slightest degree prepared for so important
a function, and is often placed under physically abnormal
conditions. Alexandre Dumas says in Les Femmes qui tuent
that a distinguished Roman Catholic priest told him that, out of
one hundred women who married, eighty came to him afterwards and
said that they regretted it. And this is scarcely strange.

It is even less necessary, Bebel proceeds, to point out the
position of the ordinary unmarried woman under present conditions.
She is shut out from what is considered a woman's career and other
careers are only to a limited extent open to her. It is worthy of
remark that Bebel is not afraid to deal frankly with the question
of chastity as it affects women. He quotes the opinions of various
medical authorities in Germany as to the effects of celibacy on
women and repeats approvingly the words of Luther: "A woman can no
more dispense with a husband than with eating, drinking, sleeping,
or other natural necessities. Nor can a man dispense with a wife.
The sexual instinct is as deeply rooted in nature as eating and
drinking." He would have those words carved over the doors of every
Protestant Church.

Therefore both the women who marry and the women who do not
marry are, under the present conditions of society, almost equally
oppressed. The existing system, says Bebel, is neither "sacred" nor
"moral." And against it he sets his own ideal. Marriage, he
asserts, should be a private contract, not effected through the
medium of any functionary. It should be "the contract of two
persons of different sex who are attracted by mutual love and
regard, and who together, according to the admirable saying of
Kant, form the complete human being."

Further, argues Bebel, a necessary element in the present system
is prostitution. It is the reverse of the medal. "Nothing shows
more strikingly the dependence of women on men than the fundamental
difference in the judgment regarding the satisfaction of the same
natural impulse in the two sexes." He points out how prostitution
with its one-sided way of regarding men and women, giving rights to
one sex which it denies to the other, is in reality as fundamental
a part of the existing state of society as the Church and standing
armies. "Remove prostitution," as St. Augustine said, "and you
render all life turbid with lust." There is, however, nothing that
is fresh in Bebel's way of dealing with this subject. Poverty and
the crushing of the natural life under existing conditions are, he
repeats, the great causes of prostitution, and these can only be
altered by a fundamental change in the social order.

The historical sketch at the beginning of the book is
necessarily too brief and fragmentary to be of much value. Bebel,
who is, however, always prejudiced when he has to speak of
Christianity, points out how even the Church, which is generally
said to have done so much for women, could scarcely attain even to
a sense of the spiritual equality of the sexes. At the Council of
Macon in the sixth century the question as to whether women have
souls was discussed and only affirmed by a small majority. He also
shows how the minnesingers of the feudal ages, who sang so
extravagantly of women, were the representatives of an unreal and
unnatural ideal, and he calls Luther the classical interpreter of
the healthy sensuality of the Middle Ages. A very short and
unimportant chapter is devoted to women in the future. Towards the
end of the book several chapters are interpolated that are quite
unconnected with the general scheme, being a general exposition of
that time when society shall be socialised. With the charming
naivete of a modern Isaiah, Bebel sings of the coming days when
there will be no immorality; children will not be unruly; the
seeking after coarse pleasures which is called forth by the unrest
of domestic life will be ended; there will be no demoralising
books; no appeals to sensual desire. All these and many other evils
will be avoided without compulsion and without tyranny. "The social
atmosphere will make them impossible." Furthermore there shall be a
central cooking establishment; a central washing establishment on a
mechanico-chemical system; a central clothing manufactory; central
heating and central lighting; central hot and cold baths. There
shall be no more maid servants, and vegetarianism (it is not quite
clearly explained why) shall be done away with.

At this point of jubilant exaltation it may be well to leave the
general consideration of Die Frau in der Vergangenheit,
Gegenwart und Zukunft, and to touch briefly on two or three of
the points which are intimately connected with the whole question
and which must necessarily be more or less considered by everyone
who undertakes to discuss the social functions of women. Whoever
asserts the equality of the sexes has to face the arguments of
those who bring forward what they consider the "scientific" aspects
of the case. One hears, for instance, allusions of a more or less
vague character to a supposed difference in the brain-development
of man and woman. Although our knowledge of cerebral organisation
is at present too imperfect for very precise conclusions, Bebel
brings forward a few of the facts relative to the size of the brain
in the two sexes, as that men of most highly developed intellect
have sometimes had brains not greater in weight than the average
woman's brain, and that among savages, when men and women are
placed under more equable conditions, the difference between the
male and female brain is comparatively slight. As Vogt pointed out,
the male European excels the female in cranial development more
than the negro excels the negress. Bebel fails, however, to point
out, as he might have done, that notwithstanding the
absolute difference there is no such clearly defined
relative difference. According to at least one series of
investigations there is even a slight advantage on the side of
women. It is a remarkable fact that not only is there less
difference between the brains of a negro and negress and those of a
civilised man and woman, but that the difference varies in
civilised countries in a very significant way. The difference is
greatest in Germany, least in France. Germany, it is scarcely
necessary to say, is undoubtedly the country in which women are
treated with least regard; it is the country which, it has been
said, supplies half the world with prostitutes; and as regards the
education of women it is behind every country in Europe, except
Poland.

In France, on the other hand, women have played a larger part
and possessed more influence than anywhere else. When we try to
think of the names of great European women we think above all of
French women. The inference is that if women were placed under
conditions equally favourable to development they would in a few
generations be at no point behind men. Bebel insists on this
because it is related to the underlying and fundamental assertion
of scientific Socialism. The individual is dependent firstly on the
material conditions of his life, then on his social and economical
circumstances, which again are influenced by climate and the
fertility and physical conformation of the earth. It is this
assertion which gives Karl Marx his scientific strength, and it is
allied to the teaching of Buckle and to some extent, it is claimed,
of Darwin. It is thus that, as the Socialists of Bebel's school
urge, Darwinism leads to Socialism.

The element of truth in this fundamental assertion of scientific
Socialism is intimately connected with the question of education.
The general importance of education in relation to the position of
women has long been recognised. But it may be doubted whether the
great significance which it possesses in regard to the relations of
the sexes has yet been adequately realised. A recent scientific
writer has asserted that "man has advanced less in knowledge as to
the proper mode of viewing the true principles that should regulate
the ethical feelings existing between the sexes than in any other
branch of knowledge." And such knowledge is not only rendered more
difficult of attainment, it is made incapable of finding a
practical outlet, so long as artificial barriers are placed between
the sexes. Bebel therefore rightly insists on the education of the
sexes together, and brings forward some of the evidence as to the
satisfactory character of its results, from an intellectual and
moral standpoint, which comes from America. He easily disposes of
the arguments, of a still weaker nature, which are brought forward
against the admission of women as medical students with men, and in
Paris, as well as in Sweden, students of both sexes sit side by
side in the medical schools with no ill results. Bebel refers to
the healthy tone of feeling which existed in Greece when boys and
girls were not carefully hidden from each other, and the physical
conformation and special functions of the organs of one sex were
not made a secret to the other sex; each could possess a delight in
the other's beauty, and sensual feeling was not as with us
artificially over-excited.

The position of women in Greece, putting aside the old Homeric
pictures, was in many ways a degraded one, but though in England we
may have little in general to learn concerning the physical
education of boys, in this respect at all events they have
something to teach us and it is worthy of remark that in Sparta,
where women had a better physical education than elsewhere, they
also possessed greater honour and influence. It is possible that
modern feeling in regard to the body will again develop a
directness and simplicity somewhat akin to the Greek feeling. "All
the superficial objections to the public activity of women," says
Bebel, "would be impossible if the relations of the sexes were
natural and not a relation of antagonism, of master and slave,
involving separation even from childhood. It is an antagonism which
we owe to Christianity which keeps them apart and maintains them in
ignorance of each other, hindering free intercourse and mutual
trust. It will be one of the first and weightiest tasks of society,
when founded on a reasonable basis, to heal this division of the
sexes and to restore to nature her violated rights, a violation
which begins even in the school." Though here, as ever, a little
unjust when Christianity is concerned, Bebel sees how the
exaggerated influence of Christianity has tended to overthrow the
balance of healthy feeling, to distort and render morbid a whole
field of human life.

There are two ideals of the union of the sexes, one or other of
which has always had its adherents. They may be conveniently called
the Greek and the Christian ideal. The one demands the most
complete freedom for the sensuous and passionate elements; it seeks
after a sunny openness, the spontaneous play of impulse. The other
ideal, which has been closely though not necessarily connected with
Christian feeling, finds its satisfaction in the exclusive union of
two individuals, for ever seeking new inner mysteries of joy, new
bonds of union. Among modern poets Schiller and Mrs. Browning have
sung the one ideal, while Goethe represents the other. Everyone
according to his temperament is attached to the one or the other of
these ideals, but whichever it may be that we are approaching one
thing at least may be demanded: there must be no artificial
hindrances in the way of human development; there must be complete
freedom for man's deepest instincts to have free play. It is
scarcely probable that either the Greek or the Christian ideal is
sufficiently large to engage by itself all the complex emotional
activities of modern men and women.

Bebel appears in this matter to tend towards the Christian
ideal. I doubt, however, whether he clearly realises the
ethical bearings of the questions he decides so
courageously. The most striking point about all sexual questions is
precisely the deep way in which they enter into such problems; and
it is impossible to ignore the wide relations of any fundamental
change to the moral feelings. From failing to insist sufficiently
on the larger bearings of the marriage question it seems that
Bebel's assertions, though true, are sometimes too partial. It is
true that, as he maintains, "the satisfaction of the sexual desires
is a thing that concerns the individual alone." But it must be
remembered that it is also a thing that concerns the race, that is
bound up with the advance of human life; since it may be
physiologically demonstrated that it is not possible for one-half
of the race to be oppressed and undeveloped and the other not be
dragged down too. The sexual relations of the individual,
therefore, concern not only the individual himself in all his
relations, but they concern more than the individual. And the chief
ethical demand on the sexual relations to-day is that these larger
bearings should be recognised; that the sexual relations should be
finally rescued from the degradation into which they have fallen;
that they should be treated with a full consciousness of their wide
human bearings for the individual and for the race. "The power of a
woman's body," it has been said, "is no more bodily than the power
of music is a power of atmospherical vibrations." And when a man
touches a woman he arouses that which is best or worst in her; it
is not her body that he touches, it is her whole mental and
emotional nature. When two human beings come near to each other,
and one is little more than an ignorant and capricious child, it is
scarcely surprising that the results should seldom be quite
satisfactory. That is why the sexual relations cannot possibly be a
matter of indifference. And that is why all social progress is
hindered while these relations also are not recognised in their
wider bearings on life.

An English writer, James Hinton, who in writings as yet
unpublished has dealt more boldly and more earnestly with the
questions of the sexual relations than any other recent English
writer I know, considered that when the question of women was
settled the whole social question would be settled. It would not be
possible, he said, for women to be placed in a true and natural
position without a correlated change in the whole social life.
Bebel, as we have seen, asserts that the woman question cannot be
settled except as an item of a general socialisation. Whichever
solution we may be inclined to adopt we may be assured that the
first thing necessary is to assert the equal freedom and
independence of women with men. For it has been the fate of woman
to suffer from those who wished to do her honour. Till the reign of
George III women were burnt alive for all treasons, because, as
Blackstone explained, it would be indelicate to expose their
bodies. "One cannot avoid a smile," Buckle remarks, "at that sense
of decency which burns a woman alive in order to avoid stripping
her naked." But to those who have studied the history of woman
through the past and who have seen how often women have been
impaled on an ideal created for the most part by men, that
explanation of Blackstone's has a certain pathos and
significance.

Once upon a time, a monkish chronicle tells us, an eloquent and
beautiful English girl appeared in Bohemia, declaring that the Holy
Ghost was revealed in her for the deliverance of women, and was
eventually, as usual, decently burnt. That was six hundred years
ago now, and though we do not know what "message" it was that that
girl had to deliver, the same spirit that found a voice in her
still speaks to-day; in literature and in life it is ever finding
more adequate expression. In America, Walt Whitman, who has so
magnificently set forth his modern ideal "Of Life immense in
passion, pulse, and power," has deeply realised the equality of men
and women and the purity and dignity of the sexual relations. In
England, struggling to regain its old position as the Paradise of
women (and where the Towards Democracy of an enthusiastic
friend and disciple of Whitman is too little known), greater
progress has been made on the whole regarding women, says the
American editor of a very interesting volume of essays on The
Woman Question in Europe just published, than anywhere else in
Europe. The ideal womanhood in England is ceasing to be, as it was
once defined, "a sort of sentimental priesthood." And while in
Germany Bebel has been exercising his vigorous and outspoken
polemics, one of the foremost of European poets, Henrik Ibsen, has
in the compass of a short play, Nora, thrown into a
perfectly artistic form the whole (or almost the whole) question of
the independence of women as it is presented to us to-day. There
cannot be, Ibsen teaches us (although, as a true artist, he always
anxiously disclaims any attempt to teach), a truly intimate and
helpful relation except between a man and a woman who are equally
developed, equally independent. He has wrought out Nora with
a keenness of insight into the most subtle recesses of the soul
that is almost marvellous, and in Ghosts, a work of still
greater genius and audacity, which there is reason to hope may soon
be translated, he has again illustrated his fresh and profound way
of dealing with the almost untouched ethical problems of the modern
world. He has realised that the day of mere external revolutions
has passed, that the only revolution now possible is the most
fundamental of all, the revolution of the human spirit. If it is
true that there is still much progress to be made in all that
concerns the most intimate and vital of human relationships, if
even so original and bold an investigator as Mr. F. Galton becomes
timid when he approaches that central problem of what he calls
"eugenics," the question of the breeding of men and women, we may
still trace, faintly but distinctly, the tendencies of thought and
life. For it is now gradually beginning to be recognised that the
new ideal of human life is only possible through the union of the
old Hellenic and Christian ideals with a third which is the outcome
of to-day and is bound up with the attainment of equal freedom,
equal independence and equal culture for men and women. It is
towards that ideal that our modern life, not without pain and
seeming failure, is slowly but surely moving.

II. THE PRESENT POSITION OF
ENGLISH CRITICISM

The "Present" here means some forty-six years past. The paper
was first sent to the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, accepted by the then
editor, T. H. S. Escott, and almost immediately returned without
explanation; the editor himself disappeared from the REVIEW soon
after. The article was published in TIME in December, 1885. I never
reprinted it as it soon ceased to express accurately my opinion;
especially I felt I had placed Symonds too high and Pater too low,
though with the low estimate many to-day will be content. The paper
is here reprinted exactly as it appeared in TIME.

THERE is something so uncertain and so various in the methods
and results of criticism, that a review of its present position
would be best begun by asking: What is criticism? Such a question,
however, would probably be considered a profitless and scholastic
exercise, and the critic of criticism has to content himself with
admitting that at present it is not quite certain what criticism
is. Yet we are not entirely without definitions of criticism. A
distinguished English critic and a distinguished French critic have
each given us a definition of criticism. According to Matthew
Arnold's well-known formula, criticism is "a disinterested
endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought
in the world." Taine says: "The critic is the naturalist of the
soul. He accepts its various forms; he condemns none and describes
all." Neither of these definitions, one notes, can be said to err
on the side of undue modesty, and Mr. Arnold's labours under the
disadvantage of not being founded on any definite conception. It is
clearly formulated for the benefit of that English middle class
among whom he desires to be an evangelist. Taine's definition is
that of a critic who is a philosopher first, and a critic
afterwards. A clear and distinct scientific conception underlies
it. He is the naturalist of the soul as it appears in literature
and art; it is there that he finds his documents
sig-nificatifs. For the individual as an individual, as a
distinct personality with its own character and idiosyncrasy, he
cares little. He is not satisfied unless he can refer the qualities
of the individual back into his environment. The vitality and
fruitfulness of this method have been attested by its results.
Taine has had an influence which has reached throughout Europe. The
naturalistic school has adopted his aesthetics; Zola prefaced to an
early novel a characteristic utterance of the master: "Le vice et
la virtu sont des produits comme le vitriol et comnie le sucre." In
Italy his influence has been great; in Denmark he has, in great
measure through the influence of his disciple, the well-known
critic, Georg Brandes, profoundly awakened intellectual life. It is
true, indeed, that, as one of the best of the young French critics
has said of him, he represents that religion of science which is
peculiar to the second half of the nineteenth century. But
notwithstanding that perfect honesty and devotion to principle
which has enabled him to face unshrinkingly the disapprobation
which the Origines de la France Contemporaine has aroused,
he has himself exhibited, in the most startling manner, the
imperfection of his own definition of criticism. The critic
describes, he tells us; he does not condemn. But it would be
difficult to find a more severe condemnation of the French
Revolution than the Origines. The naturalist of the soul
cannot avoid a moral judgment; he is dealing with the very stuff of
morals. The fact is, that a purely objective method of criticism,
founded on general principles, cannot be reached even by a Taine.
So long as we ignore the individuality of the critic, the personal
equation of criticism will never come out right. Perhaps every
critic ought to prefix a criticism of himself to his writings. We
need to know his mental history, all the influences he has come
under; we need details of his parents, of the peculiarities of his
race as exhibited in his brothers and sisters; we must have clearly
stated his prejudices, his partialities, his limitations. When that
is done, we possess the terms of our personal equation; we can
attain a true critical appreciation; and the critic's merit is
great in proportion as the deductions we have to make are
small.

How completely, for instance, we might by this method justify
the idiosyncrasies of Matthew Arnold's judgments! Even so imperfect
and partial a self-criticism as Renan's delightful volume of
Souvenirs forms an introduction to Renan's work of the very
highest value. Till this is done we are not in a position to define
criticism, or to measure the success of the critic's work which is,
practically, to find out what is really essential and significant
in the artistic product before him, and to subordinate, or
classify, that product in accordance with the largest number of its
most significant characteristics, with most sureness and with least
caprice. When Ruskin spoke of The Mill on the Floss as "a
study of cutaneous disease" he illustrated admirably the nature of
a false subordination in criticism. The more one attempts to
justify this judgment by evidence, the more untenable it becomes.
When Mr. J. A. Symonds spoke once of Walt Whitman as "more truly
Greek than any other man of modern times," the classification was
to most people perhaps as little obvious as the other, but we have
only to bring forward the evidence, to reveal the caracteres
essentiels of Whitman, and we find that it is justified.

While Taine, with an imperfect conception of criticism, has been
influencing continental thought, Matthew Arnold, with an equally
imperfect conception, has had a wide influence on English thought.
If his definition of criticism is quite untenable from a scientific
point of view, he is yet one of the earliest and most popular of
the modern English critical school, and he is largely responsible
for its merits and its defects. English criticism is fairly
catholic, fairly sympathetic, but a little too literary and too
superficial; perhaps a little too bourgeois. If it is
scarcely serious enough, it is inquisitive, appreciative, even
subtle. Matthew Arnold's aim has been to fly from flower to flower,
gathering sweets from each, never staying, so that he may bring to
his middle-class countrymen the honey he has collected—"the
best that is known and thought in the world." These flowers are,
for the most part, exotics; in Essays in Criticism, his best
and most popular critical volume, not one essay is concerned with
an English writer. And that brings us at once to one of the defects
of Mr. Arnold's critical work. He is a moralist. Macaulay asserts
grandiloquently that English literature is supreme. "I dare say
this is so," observes Mr. Arnold wearily, "only, remembering
Spinoza's maxim, that the two great banes of humanity are
self-conceit, and the laziness that comes from self-conceit," I
think it may do us good to say that it is not so. That is scarcely
the true critical temper. Mr. Arnold is constantly oppressed by his
own contentious and rather awkward formula that "conduct is
three-fourths of life." His delight in moralising is, indeed, one
of his most marked psychological features. And everyone knows with
what peculiar unction Mr. Arnold quotes the amiable platitudes of a
certain Bishop Wilson. How characteristic is this passage for
instance: "What an antidote to the perilous Methodist doctrine of
instantaneous sanctification is this saying of Bishop Wilson: 'He
who fancies that his mind may effectually be changed in a short
time deceives himself!'"

The curious limitations of Matthew Arnold's power, as revealed
in occasional calm and arbitrary failures of judgment—the
note of provincialism, as he would himself call it—are so
obvious, and to many people, so irritating, that they have
frequently aroused ample discussion, and need not be alluded to
here. Nor is it necessary to speak of his habit of inventing a
catchword, and then repeating it in varying tones and inflexions of
voice, as if endeavouring to impress some new meaning on the word,
a trick which has been caught by some of those whom Mr. Arnold has
influenced. Professor Seeley, for example, not long ago undertook
to tell us that Goethe is a serious writer—a serious
writer. Sainte-Beuve, from whom many of Matthew Arnold's best
qualities derive, was singularly free from such peculiarities of
method. In the preceding critical generation he was, as his English
disciple said, "the prince of critics." One wishes sometimes that
Mr. Arnold possessed something of Sainte-Beuve's freedom from
prejudice. There is, however, another and more fundamental weakness
in his critical work, a weakness which is, I think, connected with
that impression of superficiality which he often gives. The
literary qualities of style are not so widely diffused in England
that we can well afford to quarrel with them when, as in Matthew
Arnold's prose, we find them so exquisitely, so charmingly
developed. It would be hard to overrate the marvellous qualities of
this style—its delicacy, its lucidity, its irony, its vital
and organic music—but it remains true that an intense
preoccupation with style is almost invariably detrimental to the
finest criticism. The critic's business is not to say beautiful
things. It is his business to take hold of his subject with the
largest and firmest grasp, to express from it its most
characteristic essence. But it is part of Matthew Arnold's method,
if method it may be called, "to approach truth on one side after
another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing
forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will." One of
his best-known essays, that on Heine, is an admirable instance of
what can and cannot be obtained by this method. At the time it was
written Carlyle was accepted as an authority on German literature,
and Carlyle is said to have referred to Heine as "that pig." Here,
as usually Mr. Arnold was on the side of true criticism. He shows a
delicate appreciation of the obvious aspects of
things—especially the more un-English aspects—a sure
sense of the artistic perfection of Heine's verse, though not of
his prose, an adequate delight in his wit, a total failure to
understand his humour, the usual irresistible tendency to moralise
which prompts him to sum up by saying that Heine produced nothing
but "a half result." But Heine is peculiarly difficult to
criticise. How many books and essays have been written about him,
and how little true criticism they contain! Perhaps, indeed, the
time has not yet come for a really wide and deep appreciation of
his marvellous individuality. At present the only fairly complete
critical account of Heine that I know of in England is contained in
a careful and rather dull paper which appeared in the
Contemporary a few years ago, and which was written by a Mr.
Charles Grant. Let us, then, look at Mr. Arnold's article on
"Keats" in Ward's English Poets. Who has not heard of Keats'
"natural magic?" Here, in the shortest compass, Mr. Arnold displays
all the charm of his most exquisite literary style. And yet his
unhappy tendency to moralise, his resolve "not to persist in
pressing forward," but to enjoy merely the superficial aspect of
things, make it impossible to say that these pages, delightful as
they are, bear on them the stamp of true critical insight.

After all, we must never forget all that we owe to Matthew
Arnold. M. Bourget says of Renan that he is "l'homme superieur."
Matthew Arnold is the English "homme superieur," though not in
quite the same sense. It is the superiority voulu of a
pedagogue. If, however, he appears to possess the hereditary
instincts of a schoolmaster, and in a stern yet half-encouraging
manner deals out reproofs to Ruskin, Stopford Brooke, and others
who have not yet learnt what measure is, what style is, what
urbanity is, still it is true that the reproofs were called for,
and Matthew Arnold himself seldom forgets what those things are.
One would prefer, when charitably disposed, that one's
contemporaries should fall into his hands rather than, let us say,
be reached by Swinburne's reckless sledge-hammer. It is no mean
distinction to have been one of the foremost poets of an age, one
of its chief prose writers, and its most typical critic. This may
console Mr. Arnold when he sometimes finds arrayed against him the
weapons which he has himself forged. When a writer has become
popular and influential it is profitable, Mr. Arnold would himself
tell us, to meditate on his defects. The influence which Matthew
Arnold has exercised on recent English critical work may be seen
both in its better qualities and in its lack of thoroughness, its
tendency to degenerate into the mere literature of style. Not long
ago Mr. F. W. H Myers published two volumes of essays which were
largely of a critical character. These well-written essays were
received with all the applause which they deserved, an applause
which was unanimous, and seems to indicate that they may fairly be
accepted, both in their merits and defects, as an example of the
popular conception of criticism. The influence of Matthew Arnold's
method may, I think, be well traced in the essay on Renan.

Mr. Myers is concerned not to get to the heart of his subject,
but to give us charming and interesting passages, stimulating and
profitable suggestions—"the best that is known and thought in
the world." There are luminous points of criticism here and there,
but they are not frequent. It is a pleasant essay, it is not
criticism. It might be said that Mr. Myers is writing of a foreign
author, not, like M. Bourget, of a native writer, with whom he
could suppose his readers to be well acquainted, or, like Georg
Brandes, who writes avowedly for all Europe. Let us turn, then, to
his essay on "Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty." I have read
this essay several times since it first appeared in the
Cornhill; there is something so charming about it that it is
by no means difficult to read; but I must confess that every time I
reach the end of it no definite impression remains on my mind. It
is witty sometimes; it is carefully written; I frequently feel that
Mr. Myers is about to touch the heart of his subject; but he goes
round and round, and never seems to get any nearer. He beats the
bush with admirable dexterity, and the reader looks on expectantly,
but nothing appears. There are certain flames in
literature—Heine, Rossetti, Whitman—into which the
critical moth in England loves to dash, and Mr. Myers, like the
rest, appears to singe his wings with great satisfaction.

Another English critic, Mr. Theodore Watts, has dealt with
Rossetti much more successfully. Notwithstanding his fine sense for
artistic form, his keen faculty for mere literary analysis, Mr.
Watts sees clearly the nature of the critic's ultimate task. He is
fully aware that the critic is concerned with criticism, not with
the mere production of literature. In an article called, with some
failure of good taste, "The Truth about Rossetti," which appeared
in the Nineteenth Century about two years ago, he has
produced a criticism of Rossetti which is likely to be final for
some years to come. If we regard the present state of English
criticism, it is difficult to praise such work too highly for its
grasp of a very wonderful individuality, for its keen perception of
the relations of that individuality to imaginative art generally.
The accurate criticism of a great, and hitherto unappreciated
personality (with which, also, the critic has come closely in
contact), is a peculiarly difficult task. Swinburne's criticism of
Rossetti was a lyrical rhapsody. Mr. William Sharp, with all his
talent, with his devoted and laborious enthusiasm, has written a
volume of some four hundred pages about Rossetti, which contains
perhaps some dozen lines of genuine criticism. And when the
enthusiasm and the laboriousness are both wanting, the result may
be even more disastrous, as anyone may have observed who happened
to witness a pathetic attempt at the criticism of Rossetti by the
late Principal Shairp. Such criticism as that of Mr. Watts becomes,
therefore, very precious, and it is a matter for regret that he has
not more strenuously devoted himself to criticism of such serious
and enduring quality.

I have alluded to another writer who has been singularly
fortunate or unfortunate in attracting the attention of critics. It
would be difficult even to name the critics who have attempted to
gauge the depth or shallowness of Whitman's genius, for the most
part, not even excepting an interesting attempt of Professor
Dowden's, in a somewhat ineffectual manner. Strange to say, it is
in the prophet's own country, and from a writer who is not
pre-eminently a critic, that the most adequate appreciation of
Whitman has so far proceeded. In an essay, entitled too fancifully
The Flight of the Eagle, John Burroughs shows very
remarkable precision of judgment, and power of synthetic criticism.
His range of criticism, though narrow, is true within its own
limits. Narrowness of range marks some of our best critics. Mr.
Pater, if he has nothing else in common with Burroughs, is a true
critic within an almost equally narrow range, and with a similar
synthetic method. Mr. Burroughs' range is that of large, virile,
catholic, sweet-blooded things; he is half on the side of Emerson,
but altogether on the side of Rabelais, of Shakespeare, of Whitman.
Mr. Pater is not, indeed, on the side of "Zoroaster and the
saints;" but there is no room in his heart for the things that Mr.
Burroughs loves. For him there is nothing so good in the world as
the soft, spiritual aroma—telling, as nothing else tells, of
the very quintessence of the Renaissance itself—that exhales
from Delia Robbia ware, or the long-lost impossible Platonism of
Mirandola, or certain subtle and evanescent aspects of Botticelli's
art. To find how the flavour of these things may be most
exquisitely tasted, there is nothing so well worth seeking as that.
Even in Marius the "new Cyrenaicism" in reality rules to the
end. Joachim du Bellay is too fragile to bear the touch of analytic
criticism, but certainly it would be impossible to do more for him
than Mr. Pater has done by his synthetic method. For Mr. Pater the
objects with which aesthetic criticism deals are "the receptacles
of so many powers or forces" which he wishes to seize in the most
complete manner; they are, as it were, plants from each of which he
wishes to extract its own peculiar alkaloid or volatile oil. For
him "the picture, the landscapes, the engaging personality in life
or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of
Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say in speaking of
a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one
with a special unique impression of pleasure." This was an
ingenious and almost scientific theory of criticism, and had not
Mr. Pater seemed to swoon by the way over the subtle perfumes he
had evoked, he might, one thinks, have gone far.

If, however, the area which Mr. Pater occupies with his herbs,
and gems, and wines is small, however choice, that is but saying
that he is not a critic of the first order, and that critics of the
first order are rare. With so definite, and apparently fruitful a
method, one might have thought that all things were possible for
Mr. Pater. But a fairly catholic critic like Sainte-Beuve—for
with all his cynical caution Sainte-Beuve was catholic—rarely
has a definite method, a method to which he adheres. However it may
be in the future, the critic, in his largest development, hitherto
has been a highly-evolved and complex personality, whose judgments
have proceeded from the almost spontaneous reaction of his own
nature with the things with which he has come in contact; and so
long as that is the case, the main point is to ascertain the exact
weight and quality of the factor which the critic himself brings.
In that way, while we shall still be nothing less than infinitely
removed from the realisation of so primitive a conception of the
critic's function as Matthew Arnold's—"to see the thing as in
itself it really is"—can we only at present truly attain a
sound criticism. Mr. J. A. Symonds, among English critics,
possesses, I think unquestionably, the most marked catholicity. He
has not, like Mr. Pater, the advantage or disadvantage of a
definite method. He lives and moves in "the free atmosphere of art,
which is nature permeated by emotion." This allows him at once a
large scope, both for analytic criticism and for mere description.
Description, it is scarcely necessary to say, is not always
criticism; and Mr. Symonds, especially in some volumes of magazine
essays—the litter of his workshop—gathered together and
published—it is not, from a critical point of view, quite
easy to say why—is by no means sparing in this respect. His
power of fluent description, his wealth of exact analogy from all
domains of art, are sometimes almost oppressive. He can tell you
how a particular poem is like a particular picture, or a particular
picture like a particular fugue of Bach's. But a capacity for
profuse and minute analogy, however rich and poetic—and Mr.
Symonds' analogies often are rich and poetic; for instance, "the
beautiful Greek life, as of leopards, and tiger-lilies, and eagles
"—is not necessarily a surer guide in paths of criticism than
in paths of philosophy. In his more solid and mature work Mr.
Symonds has freed himself from these defects of his manner. In the
chief subject with which he has dwelt—the Italian
Renaissance—his method of uniting description with analytic
criticism is seen at its best. Notwithstanding the emotional
extravagance to which he is sometimes (though not at his best)
inclined, Mr. Symonds' deepest quality is his keen and restless
intellectual energy. This profoundly inquisitive temper of mind may
be seen in his sonnets, with their subtle and searching dialectical
power. To this wide-ranging intellectual force is united a certain
calm breadth and sanity which marks all Mr. Symonds' best work.
Taine, whose eager, inquisitive, intellectual force is greater
still, fails to give any impression of underlying sanity and calm.
One can always see the restless passion that throbs beneath the
iron mail of his logic. Mr. Symonds, also, is free from the
limitations of the specialist critic. His account of Shelley in the
"Men of Letters" series is, on the whole, the best that has yet
appeared; in Ward's English Poets he has written a short
criticism of Byron which sums up admirably whatever makes Byron
great and significant. It is rare to find a critic who is equally
receptive to these two so diverse artistic individualities. Taine,
with all his ostentation of scientific apparatus, has his
well-marked proclivities. When one thinks of Taine one thinks of
the things that are most exuberant, elemental, bitter, that burst
forth from the lowest depth of the human consciousness—of
Rubens, of Shakespeare, of Swift. We see his insatiable passion for
all that is fiercest and most concentrated in the elemental
manifestations of human hatred and revenge in his
Revolution. Mr. Symonds, with a much less definite method,
has less definite prejudices. But he also takes peculiar delight in
a certain order of individuality. Like Taine, he is attracted by
the manifestations of elemental passion; his intellectual energy is
satisfied by the bold, strong, unemotional imagination of the
Italian novellieri, or the same imagination with its
profound moral and emotional reverberations in the Elizabethan
dramatists.. Perhaps, however, it is the natural rather than the
fiendish aspects of passion to which he is attracted, the aspects
that are lovely and yet masculine. That wonderful Kermesse
of Rubens in the Louvre is the perfect embodiment of all that most
fascinates Taine. Mr. Symonds prefers Tintoretto's Bacchus and
Ariadne. It is the broad, masculine, sympathetic personalities
that he seems most to care about: Pontano, with his large, healthy
sensuality, his tremulous tenderness for sorrow and childhood in
the seventeenth century; Whitman, with his vast tolerance, his
audacity in the presence of all things natural and human, in the
nineteenth. What Mr. Symonds tells us more explicitly of his
philosophy of life harmonises with this bias. The motto of the
Studies of the Greek Poets is Goethe's famous
saying:—

"Im Ganzen, Guten, Schoenen
Resolut zu leben."

And in the suggestive and characteristic essay at the end of the
first series—"The Genius of Greek Art"—he declares that
there is but one way to make the Hellenic tradition vital—to
be natural. Science, he adds, will place the future man on a higher
pinnacle than even the Greek; for it has given us the final
discovery that there is no antagonism, but rather a most intimate
connection between the elements of our being. It is largely because
Mr. Symonds is so resolute to live in this conception of the whole,
that his work is so sound and so stimulating, and that he
represents to-day whatever is best in English criticism.

It is doubtful whether Mr. Symonds possesses the dangerous gift
of a keen intuition. A piercing and apparently instantaneous
insight into the heart of his subject, sometimes uncertain, as in
Coleridge, sometimes certain, as in Heine, frequently marks the
discursive and catholic critic. Carlyle had a faculty as uncertain
as Coleridge's, as keen as Heine's, for cutting into the core of a
thing. It is possible that one of his main claims to remembrance
will be found to lie in the portraits he has given us of his
contemporaries. From this point of view the Reminiscences
are peculiarly valuable. Carlyle was Aristophanic, it may be, and
his portraits have sometimes even a faint gleam of the Greek's
lyric loveliness on them; but for criticism of the piercing,
heliocentric sort there is often nothing to be compared to them,
although, wherever prejudice or partiality comes in, it is always
liable to go hopelessly astray. In criticism of this kind Swinburne
is now, without any rival, the chief English representative. More
purely literary than Carlyle, his intuitions are also, on the
whole, accompanied and held in check by a more exact knowledge. At
the best they are keen, vital, audacious, springing from a free and
genuine insight. But Swinburne also is not reliable where his
sympathies or antipathies are too strongly called forth. He is
better worth listening to when he speaks of Ford and the
Elizabethan dramatists generally, than when he speaks of Hugo or De
Musset. For all that is keen and intense his perception is vivid;
he criticises admirably what is great in the Brontes; his failure
to appreciate George Eliot is almost complete. Swinburne has also
another difficulty to contend with. Sometimes his prose style is a
very flame of power and splendour. At other times it is singularly
awkward, and clanks behind him in an altogether hopeless and
helpless fashion. What way of describing things can be more stale,
flat, and unprofitable than this discovered without much
search—"the great company of witnesses, by right of
articulate genius, and might of intelligent appeal against all
tenets and all theories of sophists, and of saints which tend
directly or indirectly to pamper or to stimulate, to fortify or to
excuse, the tyrannous instinct or appetite," etc.? One scarcely
recognises there the swift hand of the poet.

If a brief review of English criticism in its higher aspects
reveals the fact that our critics are but a feeble folk—with
exceptions, indeed, that are brilliant, though, even then, for the
most part, erratic—it is still worth while to make that
review. It is well to call them before us, and, for our own private
guidance, try to define to ourselves what it is and what it is not
that they have to give us; where we may follow them, and where we
should forbear. Criticism is a complex development of psychological
science, and if it is to reach any large and strong growth, it must
be apprehended seriously in all its manifestations.

III. TOWARDS DEMOCRACY

This review of Edward Carpenter's TOWARDS DEMOCRACY was
published, unsigned, in PAPERS FOR THE TIMES of February, 1886.
Carpenter himself was interested, and seemed even a little
surprised, to find himself here ranked among the mystics.

THE form of literary expression which has found its chief
exponent in Walt Whitman has received an important adherent in Mr.
Edward Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy, published two
years ago, has just been re-published with many additions. Whether,
as some enthusiasts loudly assert, this new form of art is to
supersede the stricter metrical forms—a very unlikely
result—or not, it has fully established its right to exist as
a flexible and harmonious vehicle for imaginative conceptions which
scarcely admit of adequate expression in the more orthodox forms.
It is not, however, really correct to speak of this as a new form;
it is one of the first in which the human imagination found voice,
and it formed the medium for the relatively ancient Hebrew psalms
and prophecies:—

"Come on, therefore: let us enjoy the good things that are
present, and let us speedily use the creatures like as in
youth.

"Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and ointments, and let
no flower of the spring pass by us. Let us crown ourselves with
rosebuds before they be withered.

"Let none of us go without his part of our voluptuousness; let
us leave tokens of our joyful-ness in every place. For this is our
portion and our lot is this."

One might almost mistake these words of The Wisdom of
Solomon for a passage from Leaves of Grass, and many
parts of Isaiah and Ezekiel reach a much higher rhythmical
level.

Let us, however, turn from the form to the substance of Mr.
Carpenter's book. It must be said at once that the democracy
towards which we are advancing, according to Mr. Carpenter (as it
is needless to tell those who are acquainted with the admirable
little tracts he has published from time to time, such as
Desirable Mansions and England's Ideal), is far from
having much resemblance to that huge beast whose advent Renan,
Scherer and Maine contemplate with doleful emotions. "A black and
horned Ethiopian," indeed, he calls it, but the freedom and
equality he announces is that of the soul, "for which the heroes
and lovers of all ages have laid down their lives," and of which
political freedom and institutions are only the outward but
necessary shadows. Democracy, he finely says, is that "which first
expresses itself in the flower of the eye or the appearance of the
skin."

"I conceive a millennium on earth—a millennium not of
riches, nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual
facilities, nor absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely
of immunity from pain; but a time when men and women all over the
earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their
bodies—shall attain freedom and joy."

It need scarcely be said that Mr. Carpenter is keenly sensitive
to the contrast between such a millennium and the England of
to-day. It is, indeed, as frequently happens, through his
perception of the wrongness of our modern life that he rises to a
perception of a coming righteousness; the optimism springs out of
pessimism.

"O England, do I not know thee?—as in a nightmare
strangled, tied and bound. Thy poverty, when through thy filthy
courts, from tangles of matted hair, gaunt women with venomous
faces look upon me;

"When I turn from this and consider throughout the length and
breadth of the land, not less but more hateful, the insane greed of
wealth—of which poverty and its evils are but the necessary
obverse and counterpart;

"When I see deadly respectability sitting at its dinner-table,
quaffing its wine, and discussing the rise and fall of stocks;

"When I see the struggle, the fear, the envy, the profound
infidelity (so profound that it is almost unconscious of itself) in
which the moneyed classes live;

"When I see avenues of young girls and women, with sideway
flopping heads, debarred from work, debarred from natural
sexuality, weary to death with nothing to do (and this thy triumph,
O deadly respectability discussing stocks!);

"When I look for help from the guides and see only a dead waste
of aimless, abject, close-shaven, shabby, simpering, flat, pompous,
pecked, punctilious faces;

But from the contemplation of the England of to-day we are
gradually led up to a vision of the higher Democracy, and the poem
ends in a paean of joy that grows almost delirious:—

"Radiant health!

"O kisses of sun and wind, tall fir trees and moss-covered
rocks! O boundless joy of Nature on the mountain tops, coming back
at last to you!

"See! the Divine Mother goes forth with her babe (all creation
circles round). God dwells once more in a woman's womb, friend goes
with friend, flesh cleaves to flesh, the path that rounds the
Universe.

"O every day sweet and delicious food! Kisses to the lips of
sweet smelling fruit and bread, milk and green herbs. Strong,
well-knit muscles, quick healing, glossy skin, body for kisses all
over!

"Radiant health! to breathe, O joy! to sleep, ah! never enough
to be expressed!

"For the taste of fruit ripening warm in the sun, for the
distant sight of the deep liquid sea; for the touch of the air on
my face, or creeping over my unclothed body, for the rustling sound
of it in the trees, and the sight of thin tall stems springing so
lightly from the earth.

"Joy, joy, and thanks for ever!"

Like Walt Whitman, Mr. Carpenter has a profound sense of the
mystery and significance of the body: he cannot see any salvation
for man till he is able to enter into pure and frank relation with
his own body, the latest and best gift of nature, so long
concealed; it is by his body, he insists, that man ascends and
knows himself and he cannot treat it too reverently. "The body is
the root of the soul."

"Recurved and close lie the little feet and hands, close as in
the attitude of sleep folds the head, the little lips are not yet
parted;

"The living mother-flesh folds round in darkness, the mother's
life is an unspoken prayer, her body a temple of the Holy One.

"I am amazed and troubled, my child, she whispers—at the
thought of you; I hardly dare to speak of it, you are so
sacred;

"When I feel you leap I do not know myself any more—I am
filled with wonder and joy—Ah! if any injury should happen to
you!

"I will keep my body pure, very pure; the sweet air will I
breathe and pure water drink; I will stay out in the open, hours
together, that my flesh may become pure and fragrant for your
sake;

"Holy thoughts will I think; I will brood in the thought of
mother-love. I will fill myself with beauty: trees and running
brooks shall be my companions;

"And I will pray that I may become transparent—that the
sun may shine and the moon, my beloved, upon you.

"Even before you are born."

Our first thought on opening this volume for the first time is
that we have come across a weak imitation of Leaves of
Grass; but on growing familiar with Towards Democracy we
find that we have here a distinct individuality, with, indeed,
points of contact with Whitman, and using the same mode of
expression, but a new and genuine voice nevertheless, not a mere
echo. Even the form is not quite the same; it is flowing and
eloquent rather than with the massive Aveight of Whitman's
interrupted elephantine steps. There is a strenuous vitality in
Whitman; his voice is like a trumpet; he radiates life and energy
from a vast centre of vital heat; he is the expression of an
immense dilatation of the individual personality. But in this
volume the bounds of personality are, as it were, loosened; and we
have instead the soothing voice of an almost impersonal return to
joy. Mr. Carpenter on the whole does not strive nor cry; he lifts
up, rather, a tender voice of love and healing. It is the note of
Consolation rather than the stimulating "barbaric yawp" that we
hear.

"As long as you harbour motives, so long are you giving hostages
to the enemy—while you are a slave (to this and that) you can
only obey. It is not you who are acting at all.

"Brush it all aside.

"Pass disembodied out of yourself. Leave the husk, leave the
long, long prepared and perfected envelope.

"Enter into the life which is eternal. Pass through the gate of
indifference into the palace of mastery, through the door of love
into the house of deliciousness.

"Give away all that you have, become poor and without
possessions—and behold! you shall become lord and sovereign
of all things." For this messenger of the new Democracy is a
mystic; it is the bold and gentle spirit of St. Francis that we
hear anew; and the modern man, too, as he looks at the horse and
the cat, and the ant on the grass by the barn door asks: "Do you
not know your mother and your sister and your brother are among
them?" The human heart still cries out for consolation and the old
oracles with ever new voices still utter their responses.

We have been looking rather at the democratic and religious
aspects of Towards Democracy than at its artistic or poetic
aspects. There are, however, many passages full of poetic charm, of
large and gracious imagery, of tender and delicate observation of
nature. Of the shorter poems which form the larger part of the
book, "York Minster," "In the Drawing Room," "After Long Ages," are
among the best. "High in my Chamber," and passages in "After Long
Ages," reveal Mr. Carpenter's command of his form; there is a swift
and sustained melody in them which is unlike anything that Whitman
has done. "Squinancy Wort" is a brightly expressed fancy. "Have
Faith" is a brief and pregnant compendium of mystical philosophy,
such as found in Eckart one of its chief exponents; and like
Eckart, Mr. Carpenter asserts the perilous doctrine that "whoever
dwells among thoughts dwells in the region of delusion and
disease." "On an Atlantic Steamship" is a true and vivid fragment
of observation. This book—with its revolt against the
overweighted civilisation of our lives, with its frank reverence
for the human body, with the clinging tenderness of its view of
religious emotion—must not be accepted, however startling its
thesis may sometimes appear, as an isolated fact. On the one hand
it represents in a modern dress one of the most ancient modes of
human thought and feeling. On the other hand it is allied to some
of the most characteristic features of the modern world. In America
Emerson long since upheld in his own lofty and austere fashion a
like conception of life and the soul. Walt Whitman has sought to
represent such an ideal in action in the living world. Thoreau, the
finest flower of the school of Antisthenes, felt an irresistible
impulse to reduce life to its lowest terms, and he did so with a
practical wisdom which saved him from approaching the tub of
Diogenes. "Our life," he has well said, "is but the soul made known
by its fruits the body. The whole duty of men may be expressed in
one line: make to yourself a perfect body." In England, from many
various and indeed opposite directions, the same cry is raised in
the presence of the heavy burden of modern civilisation. Mr.
William Morris, who has identified himself with the cause of
Socialism, is never weary of proclaiming that for life's sake we
have lost the reasons for living. Dr. Richardson, a vigorous
opponent of Socialism, tells us the same thing, that health of body
and mind is the only standard of wealth, that the extreme wealth of
the rich and the extreme poverty of the poor ultimately reduce
richest and poorest to the same level—leaving them alike in
physical and mental weakness, in selfish indifference to the
suffering of others. And now Mr. Carpenter would have us consider
whether men do well "to condemn themselves to pick oakum of the
strands of real life for ever." Probably his chief distinguishing
characteristic is that element of mystic religion to which
reference has more than once been already made, and which is most
distinctly marked in his latest work. The mystic element in Whitman
is kept in check by his strong sense of external reality and
multiplicity. Tired of the hopeless wretchedness of life, the
mystic finds a door of deliverance within his own heart. It is idle
to rebel, as some would have us do, against this impulse towards
freedom and joy, although it has led to superstition, to unbridled
licence, to long arrests of human progress. We are compelled to
regard it—after the sexual passion which is the very life of
the race itself—as man's strongest and most persistent
instinct. So long as it is saved from fanaticism by a strenuous
devotion to science, by a perpetual reference to the moral
structure of society, it will always remain an integral portion of
the whole man in his finest developments.

IV. A NOTE ON PAUL BOURGET

Published in the PIONEER for October, 1889, and signed H.E.
At this period Paul Bourget had not yet become the champion of an
anti-modern reactionism, but it would seem that I detected in his
work the germs of later developments which for me were of little
significance, and I read nothing of his after 1889. But at that
time he was still, above all, the author of the ESSAIS DE
PSYCHOLOGIE CONTEMPORAINE, a work, though in late editions he has
toned down some of its utterances, memorable and almost
epoch-marking.

OF the younger generation of French writers Paul
Bourget—successively poet, critic, novelist—is the most
prominent and perhaps the most interesting. Even in England his
name at all events is well known; it would not be safe to assume
that his books are also well known; and yet they are marked by
certain qualities which make them worth the study of anyone who
desires to know the best that young France has to give, and also to
understand a very important phase of the modern spirit.

Bourget first appeared as a poet; he has at intervals published
several volumes of poems. In poetry he has been described as un
lakiste Parisien, an expression which at all events indicates
his peculiar complexity; but his poetic work also reveals
influences from Baudelaire, from Shelley, from Poe (whose love of
mystery appeals strongly to the imagination of modern France), and
from less known poets.

These poems, especially, perhaps, the volume called
Aveux, clearly indicate Bourget's dominant tendency from the
first to restless and unceasing self-analysis; they are full of the
struggle between life and the ideal, of the immense thirst for life
and the irresistible tendency towards the dreams of the ideal, the
sense of the sterility of passion and the impotence of
life—that pessimism, in short, which was very far from being
the exclusive property of young Bourget. "This Satan," he wrote in
his first volume, "takes my passions and kills them, and then
exposes the mangled limbs of my ideal body—just as a surgeon
does with a hospital corpse—and yet, as I see him do it, I
feel a strange fascination, rather than anger."

This is youthful, undoubtedly; Bourget's poems are chiefly
interesting because they help us to understand the man's
personality. As a poet there is a certain ineffectual effort about
him; even as a novelist, he fails to leave a feeling of complete
satisfaction. It is as a critic—in the volumes of the
Essais de Psychologic Contemporaine—that Bourget
reaches his full development. He has ceased to talk openly of his
"membres dechires" and to lament the sterility of life; his
restless and sensitive spirit has at last found adequate occupation
in, as he explains it, indicating the examples which "the
distinguished writers of to-day offer to the imagination of the
young people who seek to know themselves through books." So that in
his sympathetic and searching examination of these writers,
Bourget's Satan is still really analysing, in a more heightened
form, the elements of his own nature: this gives a peculiar meaning
and personal impress to his work.

In these two volumes, in which there is not a page without some
keen critical insight, some fine suggestion for thought, Bourget
deals, then, with the psychological physiognomy of certain leading
literary figures, chiefly belonging to modern France, and with the
psychological atmosphere which has made them possible—Renan,
Baudelaire, Taine, Flaubert, Beyle, Tourgueneff, Dumas, Le-conte de
Lisle, the De Goncourts, Amiel. His aim is thus explained in the
Preface: "The reader will not find in these pages what may properly
be termed criticism. Methods of art are only analysed in so far as
they are signs, the personality of the authors is hardly indicated,
there is not, I believe, a single anecdote. I have desired neither
to discuss talent nor to paint character. My ambition has been to
record some notes capable of serving the historian of the moral
life during the second half of the nineteenth century in France."
Each figure is treated with reference to the current influence
which it represents; thus in writing of Taine, Bourget deals with
the slowly penetrating spirit of science; Dumas, the dramatic
moralist, serves to introduce a subtle discussion of some of the
modern problems connected with love; Flaubert, and that style of
imperishable marble in which he slowly carved his great creations,
is a text for some singularly keen observations on the profound
significance of style. The essay on Renan is probably the finest;
Renan is peculiarly amenable to Bourget's delicate feminine methods
of analysis; the characteristics of Renan's spirit and manner are
set down with insurpassable felicity. On the other hand the account
of Taine is probably the least satisfactory; Taine's virile
(perhaps extravagantly virile) methods, his strong, direct positive
grip of things, does not easily lend itself to the sinuous
sympathetic methods of Bourget's analysis.

There are at least two points, on which Bourget especially
insists, which help to explain his attitude and also much in that
contemporary "moral life" which he has set himself to analyse. The
first of these (introduced in the essay on Baudelaire) is the
theory of decadence. Bourget uses this word as it is
generally used (but, as Gautier pointed out, rather unfortunately)
to express the literary methods of a society which has reached its
limits of expansion and maturity—"the state of society," in
his own words, "which produces too large a number of individuals
who are unsuited to the labours of the common life. A society
should be like an organism. Like an organism, in fact, it may be
resolved into a federation of smaller organisms, which may
themselves be resolved into a federation of cells. The individual
is the social cell. In order that the organism should perform its
functions with energy it is necessary that the organisms composing
it should perform their functions with energy, but with a
subordinated energy, and in order that these lesser organisms
should themselves perform their functions with energy, it is
necessary that the cells comprising them should perform their
functions with energy, but with a subordinated energy. If the
energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will
likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and
the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence
of the whole. The social organism does not escape this law and
enters into decadence as soon as the individual life becomes
exaggerated beneath the influence of acquired well-being, and of
heredity. A similar law governs the development and decadence of
that other organism which we call language. A style of decadence is
one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to
the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to
give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to
give place to the independence of the word." A decadent style, in
short, is an anarchistic style in which everything is sacrificed to
the development of the individual parts.

Apuleius, Petronius, St. Augustine, Tertullian, are examples of
this decadence in ancient literature; Gautier and Baudelaire
in French literature; Poe and especially Whitman (in so far as he
can be said to have a style) in America; in English literature Sir
Thomas Browne is probably the most conspicuous instance; later De
Quincey, and, in part of their work, Coleridge and Rossetti. The
second point (discussed in relation to Renan) is indicated by the
word dilettantism. Like decadence this is not a
fortunate word; it has been identified in our minds with those
defects of frivolity and superficiality into which the
dilettante spirit most easily falls, just as the style of
decadence sometimes tends to represent what Baudelaire called "la
phosphorescence de la pourriture." At the best it is marked by its
universality of sympathy and by its striving after wholeness. The
typical dilettante is Goethe. "Dilettantism is much less a
doctrine," Bourget remarks, "than a disposition of the mind, at
once very intelligent and very emotional, which inclines us in turn
towards the various forms of life, and leads us to lend ourselves
to all these forms without giving ourselves to any. It is quite
certain that the ways of tasting happiness are very
varied—according to epochs, climates, age, temperaments,
according to days even, or hours. Usually a man makes his choice
and disapproves of the choice of others, hardly understands it
even. Sympathy is not sufficient; a refined scepticism is
necessary, and the art of transforming this scepticism into an
instrument of enjoyment. Dilettantism becomes then a delicate
science of intellectual and emotional metamorphosis...It seems that
humanity experiences a deep repugnance to dilettantism, doubtless
because humanity understands instinctively that it lives by
affirmations, and would die of uncertainty. Among the famous
dilettantes » whose fame it has tolerated while marking it with
visible disfavour, we may range that adorable Alcibiades who
delighted to play such various parts, and that mysterious Caesar
who embodied in himself so many persons. Dilettantism was the
favourite condition of the great analysts of the Renaissance, of
which Leonardo da Vinci with his universal aptitudes, the
incomplete complexity of his work, his strange dream of beauty,
remains the enigmatic and delightful type. Montaigne also, and his
pupil Shakespeare, have practised this curious art of exploiting
their intellectual uncertainties for the profit of the caprices of
their imaginations. But the creative sap still flows charged with
energy in the veins of these children of a century of action. Only
at a later period in the life of a race, when extreme civilisation
has little by little abolished the faculty of creation, to
substitute that of comprehension, does dilettantism reveal all that
poetry of which the most modern of the ancients, Virgil, had a
presentiment, if he really let fall that saying which tradition has
transmitted to us: 'One grows tired of everything, except of
comprehending.'" Bourget refers to the disfavour with which the
dilettante spirit has always been received. This disfavour is not
without reason; it is true that just as the "decadent" style
exhibits the most ardent and elaborate search for perfection, so
the dilettante spirit is the realisation of those
aspirations for which we are always striving, but from its very
perfection, its breadth and universality, it has no to-morrow. It
is the style of Raphael; when we have reached it there can be no
further progress on those lines: a fresh start has to be made.
These are two of the problems which Bourget develops in these
fascinating Essais, finding, as he tells us, sometimes an
answer of sorrow, sometimes one of faith and hope, most often the
former, for his temperament is strongly tinged with pessimism; and
for him the two great forces of the modern world, Science and
Democracy, have dried up the old sources of the moral life, and
furnished none that are fresh.

Bourget's novels are by no means the least interesting part of
his work. In novel-writing his style is very simple, very delicate
and precise: except for its almost scientific exactness it has
nothing of the naturalistic school's burden of elaborate detail.
His method, as we should expect, is above all psychological and
very sincere. The range of characterisation is not wide; there is
usually a man of fairly simple nature, and a background formed of
several almost characterless persons. The chief personage is always
a woman. In his treatment of these women—Noemie, Claire,
Therese—lies the strength of Bourget's novels. When he turns
to them he is at once at home; his own essentially feminine nature
enables him to unravel with perfect insight and sympathy the
complex and unharmonised natures with which he has endowed
them.

Let us take Cruelle Enigme which Taine is said to have
declared to be the best novel produced during recent years. The
central figure is Therese de Sauve, a young married woman of
twenty-five, whose face has the serene and gracious beauty, the
mysterious smile, of Luini's Madonnas. Her husband is described as
a coarse and sensual man who has failed to gain any influence over
her heart, and who now leaves her to herself. She has had two
lovers since her marriage, but in each case has been speedily
disillusioned. She now meets and loves Hubert Liauran, three years
younger than herself, who has spent all his life at home with his
mother and grandmother. Of course he yields her all the fresh
devotion of his young heart. He satisfies the purest and sweetest
instincts of Therese's nature, and she yields him, not indeed,
complete sincerity, but tender and almost maternal love. In
response to the usual craving of lovers to be alone together in a
foreign land, she crosses the Channel to Folkestone, where Hubert
joins her for a couple of days, and they afterwards find a place of
meeting in Paris. But there is another side to Therese's nature;
there is a craving for strong sensuous impressions, an instinctive
fascination in the presence of great sensual vitality. She is
staying at Trouville, away from her husband and Hubert, and there
meets a man who is noted for his power over women. He is merely a
fine animal, but Therese yields to him almost at once; in a few
days, however, realising what she has done, she suddenly leaves
Trouville and returns to Paris. After a time a rumour reaches
Hubert; he will not believe it, but he repeats it to Therese, who
still loves him and will not conceal what she has done. He rushes
wildly away; for weeks he broods alone; at length he meets Therese
to bid her a last farewell over the ruins of his dearest illusions;
at the moment, however, of touching her hands, the old passion
returns and he falls into her arms. But it is not the same love; he
no longer has any right to reproach her.

This—crudely and briefly stated—is the story of the
cruel enigma, if it is an enigma, which Bourget presents to us. One
scarcely thinks of calling the story a work of art, it is told with
such simplicity, such sincerity; the interest, which is always
sustained, appears as much that attaching to a psychological "case"
as to a novel; at every turn we find traces of a singularly fine
and delicate observation. Bourget writes with full consciousness
that the great novelists of his country—men like Beyle,
Balzac, Flaubert—have never hesitated to analyse, keenly and
boldly, all the mysteries of passion; he is aware that his own task
is a modest one. But how unlike the average English novel!

To realise this let us for a moment compare Cruelle
Enigme with a typical English novel which appeared at the same
time, and was received with great applause, a novel which deals
with a situation superficially the same as that of Bourget's, but
with an entirely different set of characters and from an entirely
different standpoint. Colonel Enderby's Wife, written by a
lady who calls herself "Lucas Malet," is a careful and powerfully
told story of an unhappy marriage. Colonel Enderby comes of
a race of commonplace country gentlemen of the type of the homme
moyen sensuel, but he is, we are told, a "doubtfully successful
exception to this general type," a true and simple-hearted man.
Jessie, his young wife, is described as a faun-like survival from
the old world; she has no human passion; she cannot love; she
shrinks from the presence of pain and disease. When the Colonel
discovers that he is suffering from heart-disease, which demands
constant care and rest, if his life is to be preserved, he realises
that he will be an object of dislike and contempt to his wife, and
resolves, knowing all that it means, to lead his ordinary life and
satisfy all the caprices of Jessie, who is indifferent and seems to
be flirting with other men. This narrative is marked in the telling
by a certain horror of being ridiculous, by an ostentation of
cynical materialism—this is a curious characteristic of the
English novel in general as compared to the French—combined
with a profound sense of what conventionality demands. Lucas Malet
has an artistic conscience, but one feels that it is raised on a
conventionally moral, not, as with the French novelist, on a
psychological basis; she calls the novel "a moral dissecting-room."
It is evident that Therese's relation to Hubert is regarded as
scarcely less than ideal; M. de Sauve is practically non-existent;
even Hubert, though he has been brought up religiously, has only a
passing compunction at Therese's adultery. Again, Jessie's failure
to love her husband is not, like Therese's failure to be true to
Hubert, due to passion; it is described as due to the absence of
passion. Jessie excites comment in her circle because she dances
frequently with a young neighbour, but he dances well—that is
all; for the rest she thinks him a bore. The ordinary English
novelist would find it hard to paint Jessie as passionate without
taking from her even that charm that she has; Therese never fails
in womanliness; she is always lovable. We are not likely to see in
England, at present, any successful union of the French and English
novel, because our great English novelists have not touched the
facts of life with the same frankness and boldness, and their
conception of normal life is unduly restricted. Cruelle
Enigme could not be written in England with Bourget's
moderation and simplicity; it would be felt to be a little
"outrageous," and the recent English novelists who have been
touched by French influence constantly offend by their crude and
vulgar extravagance. Few of them possess even the degree of
artistic earnestness and consistency which marks the best work of
Mr. George Moore, such as much of the Mummer's Wife. But Mr.
Moore can scarcely be called English at all, except in the
occasional exaggerations of his work. English novels are still for
the most part what at one time French novels were, romantic; they
are feebly struggling after a new ideal. We need, as it has been
well said, a synthesis of naturalism and romanticism; we need to
reconstitute the complete man, instead of studying him in separate
pieces; to put a living soul in the clothed body. It is because
they have to some extent done this that the great Russian
novelists—Dostoieffsky, Tourgueneff and Tolstoi—are so
significant; and Bourget, with his more limited means, seems to be
striving towards the same ideal.

V. THE PLACE OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN
MEDICAL EDUCATION

This article appeared in THE LANCET for August 13th, 1892,
and was followed up next week by a vigorous plea on the same lines
from Charles Roberts, F.R.C.S., who at that period was actively
promoting the study of anthropology. He pointed out that botany in
its pure form had already disappeared from the medical curriculum
and might well be followed by much anatomical, physiological, and
especially microscopical work, to make room for the more directly
human and practical study of anthropology, which, in addition to
the claim I had made for it, would be of high value in public
health work. But, so far, our arguments have been in vain.

VIRCHOW, who adds to his other claims to fame that of being the
first of living anthropologists, has recently confessed that his
attention was directed to the science of anthropology by the
difficulties he encountered in the study of the insane. Charcot,
again, frequently impresses on his pupils the importance of
studying the healthy nude, and of an acquaintance with
anthropometric canons, as an aid to the diagnosis of abnormal
conditions. These utterances of two of the most honoured of our
teachers in very different fields suggest that there is a defect in
our medical courses, as they exist at present in England, which
demands, at the least, some consideration. As evidence of the close
relationship between anthropology and medical practice, it is
enough to mention that in spite of the difficulties we at present
place in the way, with a few exceptions (in which zoology alone led
up to anthropology), the chief anthropologists of the last half
century have been medical men—in not a few cases very
distinguished in the profession; at the least, they have started as
students of medicine. It is sufficient to mention in France Broca,
Topinard, Lacassagne, Manouvrier, Collignon, and Letour-neau; in
Germany, around and below Virchow, Ranke, Schaeffhausen, Ploss,
Bartels and many others; in Italy, Mantegazza, Lombroso, Sergi; in
our own country, Galton, Beddoe, Sir Wm. Turner, Flower, and
Garson, while to a somewhat earlier period belong the great names
of Prichard and Thurnam. While every medical man would find a
slight acquaintance with anthropology some help in practice, there
are certain branches of practice in which some knowledge of
anthropology is of especial assistance; for example, practice
abroad and asylum practice. No country sends out so large a body of
medical men into all parts of the world, but the amount of
scientific work done among the races of our great empire by these
men is so small that it is scarcely perceptible. French medical men
have done far more for their few colonies, and the medico-legal and
anthropological studies which have come from the Lyons school,
under the inspiring influence of Lacassagne, are especially worthy
of honour.

What is true generally of the English medical man abroad is
equally true of the English alienist at home, and must be so, since
the study of anthropology is largely the study of the
manifestations of the brain and nervous systems. In the practical
treatment of the insane England stands before every other country;
in the scientific study of the insane no leading country is so
backward. Elsewhere the exact study of madness is making rapid
progress; it is beginning to be recognised that the great truth
that knowledge means measurement (scire est mensurare) fully
applies to the brain and nervous system. But in this country the
rule-of-thumb method still reigns nearly everywhere. In the hands
of a master in psychiatry the rule-of-thumb method more often than
not leads to perfectly reliable conclusions as to the mental status
and condition of the subject before him, but it has two obvious
disadvantages: it can only be trusted in the hands of a master;
while even a master's mere impressions, however trustworthy, add
nothing to the common stock of scientific knowledge. In actual
practice, with our present knowledge of neurology, it is becoming a
great advantage to the alienist to be able to demonstrate that his
subject is twisted in anatomical structure and perverted in
physiological action; while, so far as science is concerned, in the
end it is only accurate observation that counts.

All that can be said as to the state of psychiatry generally in
England applies in even a stronger degree to that special branch of
it which deals with the criminal. During a period of nearly twenty
years no contribution to criminal anthropology of any value
appeared in this country, and although of late there may be said to
have been some revival of the science among us, it is still in an
infantile stage. Of this a striking proof is furnished by the
non-appearance of English representatives at the International
Congresses of Criminal Anthropology which have been attended by
delegates from all parts of the world. Maudsley and others have,
indeed, preached concerning the desirability of an exact study of
criminals; but while in Italy Lombroso, Marro, Ottolenghi and Rossi
have alone examined according to modern scientific methods over
3,000 criminals, English alienists have been content to leave the
first tentative practical efforts to a prison chaplain. It would,
however, be unjust to put this down merely to apathy. It is largely
due to ignorance. My own extensive correspondence with prison
surgeons (as well as with medical officers of asylums) has shown
that they often possess genuine scientific interest in the
phenomena presented to them, but that they do not know how to
observe rightly and record the facts that come before them, and
would gladly receive hints that would enable them to bring forward
results of value to scientific medicine. It should be part of the
business of medical education to give these hints.

We are often told that the medical student of to-day is
overburdened with study; and, although it must be remembered that
the period of his studies is now being enlarged, there is no doubt
truth in this statement. It becomes the more necessary, on the one
hand, to place in a period antecedent to medical studies proper the
preliminary scientific courses; and, on the other hand, to cut away
without remorse those branches of knowledge which have ceased to
possess any close connection with modern medicine. In certain
directions it is probable that the studies of medical students
might with advantage be abbreviated or rendered optional. The study
of botany, however valuable and fascinating, no longer possesses
any special advantage as a preparation for medical practice, now
that the physician is very clearly differentiated from the
herbalist and "medical botanist." An exact knowledge of the
pharmacopoeia also, which once embraced almost the largest part of
the doctor's work, may now safely be left to the medical
antiquarian. If it is necessary to make room for anthropology by
the omission or contraction of other preliminary courses, it is not
difficult to put one's finger on studies which for the student of
medicine have come to possess a value which is merely
traditional.

The point at which anthropology comes into medical study is very
clear. Human anatomy and comparative anatomy both lead directly up
to it. The study of human anatomy we cannot afford to contract. The
comparative anatomy course, however, might well be arranged so as
to afford a general view of the province of anthropology, while
passing lightly over those earlier stages of animal life which have
less concern for the medical man. With these lectures should be
associated a brief course of practical demonstrations. We can
scarcely expect at present that individual medical schools should
be at the expense of fitting up laboratories of physical
anthropology. This point would be much simplified if the excellent
suggestion of Sir Andrew Clark was adopted—namely, that there
should be a common centre for the teaching of the non-medical
branches of medical education. In the meanwhile there are existing
centres which by arrangement might no doubt be utilised. There is
Gallon's Anthropometric Laboratory in active operation; there is
the Anthropological Institute, which might become a centre of work;
and, above all, there is the Museum of the College of Surgeons, so
rich in objects of anthropological interest, and which has not
seldom been presided over by eminent anthropologists.

The time seems to have come when some small preliminary step in
the direction here indicated should at length be taken. In Paris
the anthropological Musee Broca, with its active laboratory and the
Anthropological School, has long formed part, as it were, of the
medical schools. It is not necessary for the medical man of to-day
to know much of the lower animal forms; still less necessary is it
that he should have any thorough knowledge of plants. But it is
increasingly necessary that he should understand the science of
man.

VI. THE ANCESTRY OF GENIUS

This appeared in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY for March, 1893.

MANY books have been written about genius. Usually they have
been constructed by heaping up anecdotes of more or less dubious
authenticity; or else by bringing to the front those unhappy
subjects of genius who, like Tasso and Rousseau and Cowper, have
been the victims of insanity. Within the last few months, under the
inspiring influence of Lombroso, a new step has been taken, and an
attempt made to measure accurately the physical capacities of
genius. A dozen or more Italian scientists and artists obligingly
lent themselves to minute ophthalmoscopic and other investigations,
without startling results; and later on, no doubt, the man of
genius, like the criminal and the lunatic, will be systematically
examined and measured.

Little attention has, however, been given to the interesting
study of the elements that go to the making of genius, to what we
may call its etiology, and which must be sought for mainly before
birth. How did the shiftless Stratford tradesman come to be
Shakespeare's father, and Micawber the father of Dickens? To what
extent can the facts of the parentage of genius be reduced to law?
That this question has not yet been seriously considered is due in
part, no doubt, to its complexity, in part to the extreme
difficulty of obtaining reliable and precise information;
insurmountable, indeed, in the case of an individual who lived
several centuries ago. Even in fairly recent times, the most
elementary facts regarding the mothers of many men of genius are
quite unknown; and in estimating the race to which men of genius
belong, it is not unusual to disregard the mother, although, it is
scarcely necessary to say, modern investigations in heredity lead
us to regard the mother's contribution of tendencies as of
absolutely equal value with the father's. It is only by the patient
collection of facts that we can hope to throw light on the causes
that determine genius, and I propose to bring forward a portion of
the results of investigations I have lately made into this subject.
I select a small but interesting group of facts bearing upon a
single aspect of the matter: the ancestry of some of the chief
English poets and imaginative writers of recent years, with
reference to the question of race.*

[* The information on which this article is
founded has in most cases been obtained from the writers in
question. I am indebted to them for the readiness with which they
have answered my questions. Only in the case of Browning, among the
English writers brought forward, have I been unable to add to the
information already made public.]

Let us, first of all, take the five English poets whose
supremacy during the last quarter of a century is universally
acknowledged, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris.
What is to be learned from an inquiry into the races, or
combinations of races, that have gone to the making of these
men?

Tennyson was one of the most English of English poets. He came
of a family long established in the most Scandinavian county, and
that contains the fairest-featured people to be found south of the
Humber; and the name itself (Tonnesen) remains to-day purely
Scandinavian.

"The Tennysons," writes Lord Tennyson, "come from a Danish part
of England, and I have no doubt that you and others are right in
giving them a Danish origin. An ancestor of my mother's, a M.
Fauvel, or de Fauvel, one of the exiles at the time of the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, is French." He adds, "I have
myself never made a study of my ancestry, but those who have tell
me that through my great-grandmother, and through Jane Pitts, a
still remoter grandmother, I am doubly descended from Plantagenets
(Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and John of Lancaster), and this through
branches of the Barons d'Eyncourt." These remoter interminglings
are, however, of slight interest. Taken altogether, we see a
predominantly Scandinavian stock of Tennysons mingling with the
Fytches, Lincolnshire people, also, but with the foreign Huguenot
strain.

Swinburne's ancestry, from the point of view of race, has, with
some important differences, a general resemblance to Tennyson's.
That is to say, the foundation is Scandinavian, but in this case
the more emphatic and turbulent Scandinavian of the north country,
modified by distinct foreign Celtic and other influences. As
Swinburne himself clearly expresses it, "The original root, of
course, is purely Scandinavian, modified (possibly) by repeated
exile in the cause of the Stuarts, and consequent French
alliances." His great-grandfather, for instance, married a wife
from the family of the Auvergnat Princes of Polignac. It is to this
alliance that there is allusion in the "Summer in Auvergne," in the
second series of Poems and Ballads, when the poet gazes on
the ruin

"Of the old wild princes' lair
Whose blood in mine hath share.

Dead all their sins and days;
Yet in this red crime's rays
Some fiery memory stays
That scars their land."

With William Morris we reach a totally different district of
England, and a new combination. He belongs to the Welsh border; and
a border country, it may be noted in passing, is as favourable to
the production of genius as it is to the production of crime. Both
on the father's and the mother's side he belongs to Worcestershire,
the home of a varied and well-compounded race, perhaps
predominantly Saxon,* though Mr. Morris is predominantly Welsh. The
paternal grandmother, however, came from the Anglo-Danish county of
Nottingham. "My father's father was Welsh, I believe," Mr. Morris
writes, "and my mother's mother, also. My name is very common all
along the border. The name," he adds, "is undoubtedly Cymric." It
is certainly remarkable that the poet who, of all English poets of
the century, has most closely identified himself with the
Scandinavian traditions of the race should have, apparently, so
little blood relationship with the north.

[* Dr. Beddoe says that the physical type in
East Worcestershire "seems to be a cross between the Saxon and the
Iberian."]

It is equally remarkable that Rossetti, a poet whose imagination
has appeared to many critics distinctly and intimately English in
character, should be English only on the side of one grandparent;
the English blood, that is, being numerically equivalent only to
twenty-five per cent. Gabriele Rossetti, the father, came of a
family which throughout the eighteenth century, at all events, had
lived on the Abruzzi coast, at Vasto. When an exile in London,
Rossetti married the daughter of Gaetano Polidori, a Tuscan, who
had married Anna Maria Pierce, who seems to have been of unmixed
English blood, and who belongs to a family some of whose members
attained to a certain amount of distinction. Her mother's name is
believed to have been Arrow. It is worthy of note that the name
Rossetti seems to indicate a fair and ruddy northern race. Gabriele
Rossetti used to say that the original name of his race was Delia
Guardia (families of that name still live at Vasto), but that,
ruddy hair and complexion having been brought into the family, the
generation of Delia Guardia children on whom it became impressed
came to be known as the Rossetti, a name which stuck to that branch
of the race, and became its actual surname. Two of Gabriele's
brothers (to say nothing of himself) were counted as local
celebrities. His mother's surname was Pietrocola.*

[* For much of the information given above I am
indebted to Mr. W. M. Rossetti.]

In Browning's case we are able to go back a considerable
distance, and to ascertain his component races with fair precision.
The Brownings belonged to Dorset, and the poet's great-grandfather,
Thomas Browning, was, as his name shows, of West Saxon stock,
modified considerably, no doubt, by the old dark British blood
which is plentiful in that neighbourhood. Thomas Browning married a
Morris. This union produced a Robert Browning, who came up to
London, entered the Bank of England, and played a successful though
not brilliant part in the world. He married Margaret Tittle, a
Creole, born in the West Indies. The poet himself, it may be added,
was in early life of "olive" complexion, and liable to be mistaken
for an Italian. In after life he became lighter. Robert Browning,
the poet's father, was a versatile and talented man, though not so
able an official as his father. He was a good draughtsman and a
clever verse-writer. He married Sarianna Wiedemann, of Dundee. This
was an entirely new departure, and united the dark southern stock
to the fair northern race; for Sarianna Wiedemann's father was a
German, said to belong to Hamburg, and her mother was Scotch.
Browning's ancestry is very significant. If the Browning race had
consciously conspired to make a cumulative series of trials in the
effects of crossbreeding, they could not have chosen a more crucial
series of experiments, and the final result certainly could not
have been more successful. Browning himself was true to the
instincts of his race when he carried the experiments one step
farther, though on quite different lines, and married the chief
English woman poet of his time.

When we turn from these five poets to contemporary writers whose
claim to very high rank is not universally conceded, it is no
longer easy to choose, and one is liable to the charge of admitting
only those cases which seem to support a theory. I will bring
forward a small but very varied group, containing the best-known
living English imaginative writers (beyond those already mentioned)
of whose ancestry I have detailed knowledge. There is, however, no
reason to suppose that the addition of other names of equal rank
would alter the character of the results. The list includes Mr.
Coventry Patmore, Mr. Austin Dobson, the Hon. Roden Noel, Miss
Olive Schreiner, Mr. Walter Pater, Mr. Baring Gould, and Mr. Thomas
Hardy. It will be observed that there are here several writers of
prose, but these are in their best work essentially poets. The most
questionable figure is Mr. Thomas Hardy, whose poetic and yet
delicately realistic work serves as a transition from the work of
writers like the authors of Mehalah and The Story of an
African Farm to that of essentially prosaic writers, like the
authors of All Sorts and Conditions of Men and A Mummer's
Wife. Mr. Coventry Patmore is English on the father's side,
Scotch on the mother's, and one of his great-greatgrandfathers
(Beckmann, the painter) was Prussian. Mr. Austin Dobson belongs to
a Devonshire family on his mother's side, and his father was born
in France, of a French mother. Mr. Roden Noel, who (as Lord
Tennyson was also supposed to be) is descended from the
Plantagenets, and who claims the Sidneys and Shakespeare's Earl of
Southampton among his ancestors, inherits on both sides very
various strains, recent and remote. These include an Irish (purely
Celtic) element, Scotch Douglases, and Dutch Bentincks. Miss
Schreiner is German, English, and Jewish. On her mother's side she
belongs to an English family of Lyndalls, and on her father's to a
Wurtemberg family in the neighbourhood of Stuttgart. The German
paternal element (associated with dark brown hair and grey-blue
eyes) by no means necessarily involves a marked Teutonic strain.
Wurtemberg is the home of a brachycephalic race (very carefully
studied from the anthropological standpoint by Von Holder), which
is much more closely related to the typical Celts than to the
typical Teutons; and Swabia, unlike the genuinely Teutonic regions
of northern and eastern Germany, which have produced few or no
poets, has always been a land of song, the birthplace of Schiller
and Victor von Scheffel, and the richest nest of singing birds that
Germany has to show. The maternal Lyndalls came from Scandinavian
parts of England, and the name is Scandinavian. But the physical
characteristics of the Lyndalls are not Scandinavian; they have
very dark hair, and large dark eyes which impress strangers as
Jewish. It is somewhat remarkable that this strongly marked element
which has been so persistent is rather remote, and was introduced
in the person of a Jewess, who was a great-great-grandmother to
Miss Schreiner.

Mr. Pater, as the name indicates, comes of a family that on the
father's side was originally French. Mr. Pater believes that the
family is that to which the painter, J. B. Pater, belonged; not,
however, descended from the painter, who had no children. The
Paters certainly came from the same neighbourhood; that is, from
Flanders, somewhere near Valenciennes. They were lace-makers and
Catholics, and Mr. Pater's great-greatgrandfather settled in the
very Anglo-Danish neighbourhood of Norwich. The family then took
root in Buckinghamshire, where one branch of it, still Catholic,
possesses considerable property. Watteau also belonged to
Valenciennes, and it is curious to observe how faithfully Mr.
Pater, with his subtle and delicate art, has preserved the
instincts of his Belgic race.

Mr. Baring Gould's interesting account of his ancestry I will
give in his own words: "My family have held property in Devon for
three hundred years and more, and have intermarried almost wholly
in the Devon families, till the heiress married Charles Baring, son
of John Baring of Exeter, son of Dr. Franz Baring of Bremen. But
Charles Baring's mother was an Exeter woman. The Barings were pure
Saxons. Before that, among the Goulds, the hair was dark and the
eyes were hazel, judging from their pictures; after that, fair hair
and blue eyes. My mother was a Bond, a Cornish family; my
grandmother, a Sabine, and partly Irish; that is, in seventeenth
century in Ireland, after that settled in Herts." One traces here
very clearly the influence of race and its effects on one of the
most singularly brilliant and versatile writers of our time. Mr.
Thomas Hardy belongs to a Dorset family, which has not, apparently,
encouraged foreign alliances, although the Hardys at a remote
period are believed to have been a French family who emigrated from
Jersey. Of Mr. Hardy's four grandparents, all belonged to Dorset
except one, who came from Berkshire. His paternal
great-grandmother, Mr. Hardy believes, was Irish. On the paternal
side, also, a black-haired ancestor left very distinct traces,
while on the mother's side the race was fairer, and closer to the
ordinary Wessex-Saxon type.

From the examination of these two groups of imaginative writers,
chosen without reference to the question of heredity, the
interesting fact emerges that, of the twelve persons cited, not one
can be said to be of pure English race, while only four or five are
even predominantly English. A more extended investigation would
bring out the same result still more clearly. England is at the
present time rich in poets. A general knowledge of a considerable
number of them enables me to say that very few indeed are of even
fairly pure English blood; the majority are, largely, or
predominantly, of Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, or Cornish race, as a
single glance, without any inquiry, is often enough to reveal.

If we turn to the rich and varied genius of France, we shall
find similar results brought out in a way that is even more
remarkable. In France, we meet with very various and distinct
races, and we see the interaction of these races, as well as the
commingling of remote foreign elements, from the negro blood which
it is still easy to trace in the face of Alexandre Dumas, in
certain aspects, to the Iroquois blood in Flaubert. French genius,
from the point of view of race, is a large and attractive subject;
but as I am dealing with it elsewhere, I will leave it untouched
here. However, it is worthy of notice that the two imaginative
French writers of this century who have attained widest fame, and
have exercised the most revolutionary influence on literature,
Victor Hugo and Zola, are both marked examples of the influence of
cross-breeding. Hugo belonged, on the father's side, to the tall,
fair, powerful Germanic race of Lorraine, where his ancestors
cultivated the soil in the Vosges; on the mother's side, he
belonged to the Breton race of the opposite end of France, a race
with widely different physical and spiritual characteristics. Zola
is the son of a distinguished Italian mathematician, born at
Venice; his mother came from the central Beauce country of France:
he has Italian, French, and Greek blood in his veins. The only
living imaginative writer besides Zola who is exerting
international revolutionary influence on literary art is Ibsen,
another example of complex racial intermixture. His
great-grandmother was Scotch, his paternal Scandinavian stock has
received repeated infusions of German blood, and his mother was of
German extraction.

In many of these complex combinations, we come upon the result
not only of accretion of power due to cross-breeding, but of the
fascination exerted by a startlingly new and unfamiliar
personality. Ronsard, that brilliant child of the French
Renaissance, whose name has scarcely yet lost its charm, though so
few know his work, came of Hungarian or Bulgarian stock allied with
the noblest families of France. St. Thomas, the one saint who for
three hundred years charmed the cautious and sturdy English race,
was the son of a French father, possibly also of a French mother.
Pushkin, whose personality was as delightful to his contemporaries
as his poetry, bore one of the proudest of Russian names, and in
his veins ran the blood of an Abyssinian negro. A whole nation
would never have gone joyfully to destruction under a leader they
had themselves chosen, if that leader had not been
Napoleon—the result of the mixture of two very distinct
races, the Tuscan and the Corsican—who carried about him the
charm of the unknown. Boulanger, who for a short time exerted an
attraction that seemed so unaccountable, was the son of a Scotch
lady, whom he was said to resemble, and to whom, doubtless, more
than to his father, the Breton notary at Rennes, he owed his power
of fascination.

The evidence I have brought forward as to the frequency of
racial mingling in men of imaginative genius has been confined to a
few particular groups; it could easily be increased, and I have
made no use of the materials in my possession concerning Spanish,
Italian, and Russian poets. It is clear that the proportion of
mixed and foreign blood in the groups dealt with is much greater
than would be found in a similar group of average persons. Anyone
may test this by writing down at random the names of a like number
of his acquaintance of average ability, and then investigating
their race. In England, in such a group of seven ordinary persons,
it is rare to find more than one of decidedly mixed race. But in
the groups we have been considering the proportion of such
individuals varies, at a moderate estimate, from fifty to
seventy-five per cent., and the mingling is usually most distinct
in the men of most distinguished genius.

I believe that if we take other groups of somewhat similar
character, eminent painters, for example, we shall find the
proportion smaller, though still marked. Among notable scientific
men we should find the proportion of those with mixed blood lower
still. Mr. Galton, who made a long list of contemporary British
scientific men of ability, remarks that, "on an analysis of the
scientific status of the men on my list, it appeared to me that
their ability is higher, in proportion to their numbers, among
those of pure race." The Border men come out exceedingly well, but
the Anglo-Welsh and the Anglo-Irish would on the whole rank last.
While we have found that among twelve eminent British imaginative
writers no less than ten show more or less marked traces of foreign
blood, and not one can be said to be pure English, Mr. Galton found
that out of every ten distinguished British scientific men five
were pure English, and only one had foreign blood. Among successful
politicians, again, mixture of race appears to be still less
common. It is worth while, however, in this connection, to quote an
utterance of the most distinguished of living English politicians.
"Now, you must know that I am a Scotchman," said Mr. Gladstone to
an interviewer, "pure Scotch. In fact, no family can be purer than
ours, which never mixed with extraneous blood except once in the
seventeenth century." As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone unites, on
his father's side, the Saxon Lowlander of the south of Scotland
with, on his mother's side, the typical Highlander of the north,
two utterly distinct races, although by accident confined within
the same country. We always have to guard against these fallacies,
but as a rule, no doubt, politicians of ability are of
comparatively pure race. It has generally been believed by those
who have concerned themselves with the philosophy of art that
poetry is the highest and most complex form of human expression,
and the result indicated by the evidence before us seems in
accordance with that conclusion.

Looking at the matter somewhat broadly, and omitting minor
variations, it may be said that two vigorous but somewhat widely
divergent races (or groups of races) now occupy Europe and the
lands that have been peopled from Europe. The one race is tall,
fair, and usually long-headed; the other, short, dark, and usually
broadheaded. Since the dawn of European history, at least, and with
special vigour about a thousand years ago, the tall, fair,
energetic race has been shed as a seminal principle from the
north-east of Europe over a great part of the continent held by a
darker and perhaps more civilised race. The physical
characteristics of Europe have been very favourable to the spread
and fusion of these fine races, and the outcome has been the
strongest and most variously gifted breed of men that the world has
seen. Wherever the races have remained comparatively pure we seldom
find any high or energetic civilisation, and never any fine
flowering of genius. Sweden, where the tall, fair, long-headed race
exists in its purest form, has produced no imaginative genius.
Auvergne, where the dark, broad-headed race may be found in great
purity, has, in like manner, produced a vigorous but an
undistinguished breed of men. Corsica and the Pyrenees-Orientales,
where a fairly unmixed race of dark, long-headed men live, have,
unlike Sicily or Gard, produced no poets. Wherever, on the other
hand, we find a land where two unlike races, each of fine quality,
have become intermingled and are in process of fusion, there we
find a breed of men who have left their mark on the world, and have
given birth to great poets and artists. Such are the men of Sicily,
a race compounded of the most various elements from east and south
and north, which has produced, and is to-day producing, so large a
share of the genius of the Italian peninsula. Such are the fair and
tall but broad-headed men of Lorraine, a cross between Celt and
Teuton. Such are the Lowland Scotch, on the borderland between Gael
and Saxon. Such well-tempered breeds have been yielded by Normandy
and Tuscany and Swabia. We know little of the physical anthropology
of the ancient Greek, but it is certain that one of his most
characteristic types was the tall, fair man we know in the north;
and the geographical and geological characteristics of Greece
present in perfection the conditions which enable varying races to
settle and develop in the closest proximity to one another.

Great Britain and Ireland were placed, by a happy chance,
broadside on to the invasion of the fair race. The elongated
islands thus presented the maximum of opportunity for intercourse
between the two races. Even at the present time the process of
fusion is still going on. The comparatively fair race extends along
the east coasts of both islands, and the comparatively dark race
along the west coasts. The islands form, therefore, a well-arranged
pair of compact electric batteries for explosive fusion of the two
elements. Both races are necessary for the production of
imaginative genius, at all events, for it is a mistake to suppose
that high imaginative genius is a characteristic of the unmixed
dark races. In Dr. Beddoe's map of the British Isles, showing what
he terms the index of nigrescence, one solitary islet of the dark
race only may be seen in England, east of the Welsh border, and
apparently at one time joined to it. This islet is in Warwickshire;
that is, in the county of Shakespeare. Milton's family belonged to
a neighbouring county, and Milton himself, we know, had Welsh blood
in his veins. Out of the play of these two races has come all that
is finest in English imaginative genius.

It need scarcely be said that this cross-breeding is not the
only factor in the causation of genius. If that were so, genius
would be much more common than it is, while it would be the rule,
instead of a rare exception, to find it shared by brothers and
sisters. There are other influences that tend to produce genius,
and various conditions that promote its development. I have here
simply tried to indicate one of the factors in the determination of
imaginative genius.

VII. AN OPEN LETTER TO
BIOGRAPHERS

I am uncertain of the exact date of this OPEN LETTER, though
I believe it was 1896. It presents my impressions while completing
the preparatory work for A STUDY OF BRITISH GENIUS, and I sent it
to the editor of the NEW REVIEW, who returned it. Then I put it
aside, and it has only been printed, many years later, as an
appendix to Dr. Isaac Goldberg's book, HAVELOCK ELLIS, though it is
now also issued by Mr. Joseph Ishill at his Oriole Press, Berkeley
Heights, New Jersey, U.S.A.

DEAR SIRS:

DURING recent years I have spent many silent hours in your
company. These hours have passed more or less pleasantly. It is
because I can only look back upon them with mingled satisfaction
that I venture to address you now.

Let me explain, in the first place, that I sought your society
as a student of that rare and marvellous human variation which we
vaguely call "genius;" I desire to collect, so far as this may be
possible, the material which will enable me to state some fairly
definite conclusions concerning the complex nature and causes of
genius. You will observe that I may thus be described as your ideal
reader. I come to you, not to pass away my idle moments, nor
because I look up to this religious leader or follow that
politician or am the devotee of any musician or painter or poet; I
come to you with the challenge to produce your finest revelation
concerning a certain unique personality in whatsoever manner that
personality may have been manifested. For you all profess that you
are striving to set forth such unique personalities, and I have
sought from you in vain the greatest revelation of all, "The Life
of an Average Man." You undertake to tell me of these unique lives,
and with my head full of questions I take up my pencil to note down
or underline your answers.—I have often flung away that idle,
superfluous pencil.

This is why I venture to approach you collectively now. I have
long listened to you in respectful silence. The years have rendered
my respect somewhat critical, and I trust you will pardon the
remarks with which I now break my silence.

You do not, I have said, tell me a fair portion of the things I
desire to know. That fact I shall try to drive home later. I wish
first to point out that you do tell me a great many things that I
have no desire to know. You will tell me the lives of the men your
hero knew; you will tell me his common-place remarks concerning the
common-place people he met, and the towns he sojourned in; you are
seldom tired of telling me in fullest detail of the honours that
were showered on his declining years. But all this is not
biography. And there is a more subtle error of commission
into which you frequently fall headlong. You assume the function of
the historian. Now a biographer is not a historian. It is quite
true that men make history. But we cannot study the individual man
in the same way as we study the product of many men's activity. The
method which is best fitted for investigating the Reformation is
not best fitted for studying Luther's portrait; the adequate
biographer of Laud will scarcely be the adequate historian of the
English Revolution. The better equipped a writer may be for the one
task, the more badly equipped he will be for the other. The whole
tone and touch must be different, and much practice in the one
medium will no more give skill in the other than practice on the
organ will make a man an accomplished pianist. But it is by
practice on the organ of history that the most conspicuous among
you have usually come to the piano of biography. And you often
forget that you are not at the organ still. Some of you are now
engaged on the Dictionary of National Biography. It is a
useful and fascinating task; when complete there will be no such
delightful work of its size in the language. But, in any volume of
it, I can turn from "biography" to "biography" which contains not
one line of genuine biography to the page; instead you have given
us slices of mis-placed history. Clearly you have seldom asked
yourselves: WHAT IS BIOGRAPHY? You have simply assumed that it is
the part a man plays in the history of civilisation. But that is to
stultify both biography and history. In history we can never see
truly from the standpoint of a single actor, and biography is thus
made mere bad history. Undoubtedly any great man bears with him the
mat eriaux pour servir in the making of the history of
civilisation—whether in his deeds or his discoveries or his
art-products—but the cataloguing of these is something beside
the purpose of biography, just as the description of the face of
the earth is beside the astronomer's purpose, however intimately
the earth may hang to the sun. True, it is not impossible to trace
the life and soul of an artist in his work. But this is only done
by a special keen precision of touch such as Leynardi has expended
on the dissection of the Divina Commedia, and not by the
methods of the commentator who tells me all about every person or
place Dante has mentioned for no better reason than because Dante
has mentioned it. To write history, whether of a nation or of
civilisation, is to write a complex whole in which the products of
many men's activities have fermented together to yield something
which is as far from the minds and lives of the men who made it as
Christianity is from the mind and life of Jesus. To describe the
products of a single man's activity, whenever it is worth doing at
all, is to write prolegomena to history. To describe the birth and
growth of a great man as he was in his real nature, physical and
psychical—as a grape-cluster on the tree of life and not as a
drop of alcohol in the vat of civilisation—that is
biography.

I have it against you, then, that you who are charged with this
high task are perpetually seeking to merge it in a lower or at all
events a different task. But I would content myself if, after all,
you really enabled me to gain a picture of the man. I would gird up
my loins, fling to right and to left the extraneous matter that you
pile up around me and make straight for the vital facts. But they
are not there! Many and many a voluminous so-called "biography" I
can compress into a couple of pages, and likely enough even these
pages will reveal less than the vivid laconic portraits that
Carlyle set down as by lightning flash of the men he but passingly
met. Thus the authorised and only life of Young, not published
until many years after his death, so far as really salient and
pregnant facts are concerned can be compressed into six lines; the
one supremely illuminative fact in it is the reproduction of his
portrait. Now here is one of the most brilliant and versatile
heroes of science that this country ever produced, a man who ranks
with Harvey and Newton and Darwin, and the best that you can do is
to lose to us for ever the chance of knowing the manner of man that
he was in body and spirit: there remains only the image of the
beautiful childlike face, with the sweet mouth and the large eager
eyes, as Lawrence painted it. In every man of genius a new strange
force is brought into the world. The biographer is the biologist of
this new life. I come to you to learn the origins of this
tremendous energy, the forces that gave it impetus and that drove
it into one channel rather than into another. I will gladly
recognise that nowadays you generally tell me of the hero's
ancestors; formerly you told me nothing of the mothers of great
men, seldom even the name, and that is one of the most hopeless
lacunae in the right understanding of genius. How gladly
would I know more definitely the race and nature of the mother of
that saint who for so many centuries won the love of Englishmen and
whose shrine is furrowed deep by the knees of Chaucer's pilgrims!
And yet while race and family are certainly an enormous factor in
the making of every man, I would wish to point out to you that they
are not omnipotent—for then the hero's brothers and sisters
would always be heroes too—so that you need not trouble
yourselves or us with the trivial details of the lives of these
ancestors. But it would be well if you could tell us something of
the stars that shone in the making of the individual life. We
desire to know the influences, physical and moral, which surrounded
the period of his conception, the welfare of his pre-natal life,
whether he was born naturally and in due season. All the facts were
once known in the area of the hero's family circle; some at least
among you could have told them to us and so have made many things
plain which now remain obscure. Rarely indeed have you done so,
rarely even have you recognised that such questions are a part of
knowledge. Yet the fate of all of us is in large measure sealed at
the moment we leave the womb. Next in importance comes the curve of
life that has its summit at puberty and ends with the completion of
adolescence; whatever else there is to make is made then. The
machine has been created; during these years it is wound up to
perform its work in the world. What follows after counts for
something but always for less. You cannot tell us too much real
biography—the description of life—concerning these
youthful years. Even the detailed account of the games and
amusements devised by the young hero, such as Nietzsche's sister
and biographer has written down for us, are welcome when
obtainable; for the after-life of the man is often little more than
the same games played more tragically on a larger field. After the
age of twenty your task becomes easier and more obvious; after
thirty, if so far you have fulfilled that task, what is there
further left to tell? The rest is but the liberation of a mighty
spring, the slow running down of energy. The man recedes to give
place to his deeds, whether such deeds be the assault of great
fortresses or the escalade of mighty sentences. There is the same
heroic effort and achievement, whether on the walls of Jerusalem
when Godfrey scaled them or on Flaubert's sofa at Rouen.

But, as I have already tried to point out, mere chatter about
the deeds is not what we come for to you the biographers. If the
deeds are real they will speak for themselves in history or verse
or other shape that men will not let die. When I want to see
Velasquez's pictures I go not to you but to Madrid. But if you
could only tell me how he came to paint them! When you are dealing
with the adult hero in the midst of his work the one great service
you can do, and that which is your most proper function, is to tell
us, not about this work, but about the conditions under which it
was achieved. If you have so far done your task we know the nature
of the force; now we need to know by what channels it was
manifested. I have it against you here that—save
incidentally, partially, often hypocritically—you seldom
attempt this part of your task. You find it so much easier to
ramble on about the work and its reception than to describe the
man's method of doing it, and what hindered or helped him in the
doing. Often enough you like to represent him as doing it in a coat
of mail impervious to the shafts of human weaknesses. You are well
content when you have taken some real man—let us say, old
Abraham Lincoln, a real man if ever there was one—and in the
course of a ponderous authorised biography bleached and starched
and ironed him into a tailor's dummy. You seem to me like the
proverbial valet for whom his master is no hero. The hero on the
battlefield may be a coward to his dentist; the man who has faced a
revolution of socialistic thought may be too timid to walk down
Lisson Grove.*

[* I had a real man in mind—a
distinguished thinker.]

These things do not attenuate heroism; they are part of it. You
cannot have force in two places at the same time; and you must know
a man's weakness before you truly know his strength. It is often in
the "weaknesses"—as the valet-moralist counts
weakness—that the source of the hero's strength lies, the
weakness which, as Hinton used to put it, was the path of least
resistance through which the aboriginal energy of Nature passed
into the man. The recital of the weaknesses in detail you can spare
if you see good reason—and there is good reason why a
biography should not be a chronique scandaleuse—but if
you refuse to note them you are false to any intelligible
conception of a biographer's function, and you have produced a lie
which is as immoral as every untrue picture of life necessarily is.
Michael Angelo's Platonic affection for men went to the chiselling
of his sculpture, Victor Hugo's hollow domestic life was not
unconnected with his ideals of celestial purity, literature is full
of the unavowed confessions of opium-eaters and wine-bibbers, and
so all along. It corrupts the tree of life at the core to deny such
associations, to point only to the leaves and flowers that men call
"moral," to ignore the roots which—through your hypocrisy, it
may well be—they call dirty and "immoral." Nothing shall
induce you to admit that your Achilles had a vulnerable
heel?—And yet, if you rightly consider the matter, without
that heel Achilles would have been no hero at all. I have referred
once or twice to the "biographer's function." Sometimes I wonder
how many of you have ever considered what a biographer's function
is. With what equipment have you usually come to your task? Even
the question I feel you may regard as an insult. Yet, consider. The
novelist only attains skill in his work after failure, perhaps a
long series of failures like Balzac or Zola, rarely indeed at a
bound. The novelists whose force has developed in a night have
perished in a night. In the matter of biographies we possess what
we should possess in the matter of novels if few novelists produced
more than the early bungles of their prentice hands. And yet a
novelist has undertaken the incomparably easier task of recording
the lives of the simple puppets of his own brain. Remember, again,
that biography does not stand alone as a branch of research. Beside
biography, the life of an individual, we have ethnography, the life
of a community. To the making of a great ethnographer—an
Adolf Bastian, let us say—there are needed preliminary
training in biology and psychology, an immense knowledge of
literature, laborious research during journeys among remote savage
peoples, perpetual attention to petty details. But should a
biographer willingly admit that the life of a community is better
worth serious study than the life of its greatest man? Go to the
British Museum or the Anthropological Institute and look at those
admirable series of photographs in which Mr. Portman has reproduced
every step in the processes of life among the Andamanese, for
instance in the fashioning of a bow and arrow; or see, if you can,
the delightful photographs in which Mr. Ini Thurn has caught the
beautiful brown-skinned Indians of Guiana in every stage of their
work and especially their play. Is not the fashioning of a lyric to
pierce the hearts of men for ever as well worth study as the making
of an arrow? The child of genius gathering shells on the shores of
eternity as interesting as the games of savages? Yet few have
thought it worth while to inquire how Burns achieved his songs or
Newton his theories. It was enough to utter the blessed word
"Inspiration!" and lean comfortably back. Not so have the
physiologists solved the mystery of physical respiration.

Biography, then, is strictly analogous to ethnography, the one
being the picture of the life of a race, the other the intimate
picture of the life of a a man. Now both the one and the other are
branches of applied psychology, a strict method of scientific
research. There was a time not so long ago when psychology was not
a strict method of research and when any arm-chair philosopher sat
down to write the history of the general soul as light-heartedly as
the biographer still sits down to write the history of the
individual soul. So far as pure psychology at least is concerned,
those days are past. With the establishment by Wundt some twenty
years ago of the first psychological laboratory, psychology for the
first time became a science; and in Germany and the United
States—the two countries to which we now look for light on
this new science—the work of men like Munster-berg, Preyer,
Stanley Hall, Jastrow, and Scripture has taught us how to obtain by
exact methods a true insight into the processes of the average
human mind. No man now ventures to call himself a psychologist
unless he is familiar with the methods and results of these
workers. A few psychologists in Italy and France have pushed such
methods into the investigation of exceptional men, and like
Ottolenghi have examined the visual field of certain complacent men
of genius, or like Binet have traced out with remarkably
interesting results the ways in which certain
dramatists—Dumas, Goncourt, Sardou, Meilhac and especially De
Curel—conceive and write their plays. But how often does any
such attempt, on however imperfect material, to bring us near to
the heart and brain of a great creative personality form part of
what the biographer presumes to call "Life "? How many biographers
so much as know that they are—may the real students forgive
me!—psychologists, and that the rules of their art have in
large part been laid down?

I am quite sure, my dear sirs, that you will instinctively feel
that this is stuff and nonsense. You have your duty to the public
who pay you handsomely for doing it speedily, for the public has an
uneasy feeling that the great man's fame will turn sour if not
consumed off-hand. And then you have your duty towards your hero's
personal friends and relations who will only help you on condition
that you produce a figure that is smooth, decorous, conventional,
bien coiffe, above all, closely cut off below the bust, such
a figure as we may gaze at without a blush in the hairdresser's
window. And at bottom, you may admit at last, you distrust both
yourself and your audience, and will not publicly dare to take any
bull by the horns.

Well, there is no doubt truth in this; I must needs believe
there is, since you so solemnly and constantly repeat it between
the lines of your books. Yet, after all, there are a few men whose
fame has not died in a night, and who remain alive after their
friends and relations have turned to dust. It is in the case of
such men that I question the wisdom of sacrificing the interests of
the world to the interests of a fleeting generation. Is it not
worth while to wait five years, or even fifty years, or for the
matter of that five hundred years, and at the end to possess the
everlastingly inspiring record of a master spirit? Is it not worth
while to be accounted a fool for a century, like the man who wrote
according to his means the best of biographies, and to become
immortal at last? It is the man who is a valet at soul who shudders
at the possibility of possessing Boswell's Life of Jesus, or
Eckermann's Conversations with Homer or Froude's edition of
Shakespeare's Reminiscences and who creates an atmosphere
which renders such achievements immensely difficult. At the same
time this atmosphere renders possible a kind of hero so rare in the
world, the Hero as Biographer. That is the final point on which I
bring this letter to a conclusion. The writing of a biography is no
facile task; it is the strenuous achievement of a lifetime, only to
be accomplished in the face of endless obstacles and unspeakable
prejudice. I beg you to consider it. Then the ideal reader of
coming centuries will not sigh so wearily as I sigh when he hears
that Mr. So-and-So is being engaged on a biography of our eminent
poet, novelist, or philosopher, This, That, or The Other; that
every endeavour will be made to bring out this biography while the
sense of the loss we have sustained is still so strongly felt; and
that it is confidently expected that the large first edition will
be bought up before publication.—Not so was any great book
born into the world.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

VIII. THE MEN OF CORNWALL

After living during the greater part of seven years at Carbis
Bay in Cornwall—a county which I had previously never
visited—I resolved to set down my impressions of the people
among whom I had settled. The result was the following essay,
published in the NEW CENTURY REVIEW for April and May, 1897.

THE river Tarnar divides from the rest of Great Britain an
ancient land, small in extent but strong in its individuality. The
first impression which Cornwall makes on the traveller who enters
it by rail is that of a semi-French country; he passes stations
with names of totally foreign complexion, St. Germans, Menheniot,
Doublebois; and when he reaches his destination the names of the
streets confirm this suggestion—thus, Street-an-Pol indicates
a French rather than an English method of denomination. The
language the people speak also scarcely sounds English to the
stranger. I know a lady who immediately after arriving in Cornwall
was addressed by a Cornishwoman in words that were unintelligible,
but in tones that sounded so French that before realising where she
was she spoke in French, The inflection of the Cornish voice is
very characteristic; it rises in a musical wave to a climax reached
about the antepenultimate syllable. To the dweller in Cornwall who
returns after an absence amid the level harshness of English
voices, this soft inflection breaks as gratefully as the ripple of
the Cornish summer sea on the rocks. In certain details the Cornish
pronunciation is nearer to the French than the English; in Cornwall
they avoid the English u (ew) sound, and they like to
transform the English e; thus my own name, pronounced
"Hellis" by the genteel Cornish person anxious to ape "up-along"
folk, is "Alis" to the true old-school Cornishman, as it is to the
Frenchman. In the general physical and mental characteristics of
the race, as will be seen later on, there is much to remind the
dweller in Cornwall that he is not very far from France.

There is good reason for the presence of this pervading
impression. The Cornish, with the Welsh on one side of them and the
Bretons on the other, constitute altogether a compact group of
peoples, intimately related to each other, distantly related to the
Irish and the Highlanders outside the group. On the whole, as we
should expect, the Cornish seem more closely related to the Bretons
than are the Welsh.

"By Tre, Ros, Pol, Lan, Ker and Pen,
You may know most Cornishmen,"

the saying runs. The evidence of language is not altogether
conclusive, but we may find all these prefixes among the people and
places of Brittany, where, indeed, we even find a region called
Cor-nouaille. In Wales the names have deviated from the primitive
shape to a much greater extent. The most marked resemblance in
names between the Cornish and the Welsh is the prevalence among
both alike of Richardses and Williamses and Thomases, and so on.
The very numerous Cornish saints indicate the relationships of the
people; the saints of the Lizard district belong to Brittany, those
of North Cornwall to Wales, while West Cornwall was converted by
the Irish, with whom the Cornish have a distinct, though more
remote, affinity. In many details of custom, also, the Cornish who
preserve ancient ways recall their various Keltic neighbours.
Again, the Cornish-man is distinguished from the English by the
spade which he uses everywhere, and for all purposes, and cannot be
persuaded to abandon. The common Anglo-Saxon spade is well known;
it is a short, powerful implement with a large oblong blade, and a
cross-piece at the end of the handle, not an elegant instrument,
but well adapted to obtain a maximum output of energy from arms and
back and legs. The Cornish spade—also found in Wales and
Ireland—is often as long as its owner, with a slender,
slightly curved handle and a small heart-shaped blade; it is a
graceful instrument, adapted to the shallow soil of Cornwall,
adapted also to the lithe, slow, free movements of Cornish-men, who
possess a characteristic which has been lovingly described by a
child of the land as a "divine laziness." Such are a few of many
traits which bring the Cornish much nearer to the Welsh and the
Bretons, even to the Irish, than to the Anglo-Saxon English.

For the sake of convenience I have called the Cornish Kelts.
There is no doubt whatever that the language was purely Keltic, but
the modern ethnologist is inclined to demur when the race is called
Keltic. He points out that there were people in Cornwall before the
so-called Kelts came, and that there is no reason to suppose they
were annihilated by the Kelts, while it is very certain there have
been immigrations of other races since. There is no doubt about
this; it is indeed because the Cornish are a race well compacted of
various elements that they have been able to show such vigour and
versatility in spite of the small home they occupy in the world.
But while it cannot be said that the Cornish are pure Kelts, it
must be remembered that the Kelts form a considerable element in
the race, leaving more distinct traces here than in any other part
of England. There is, therefore, little impropriety in continuing
to speak of the Cornish as Kelts, provided we duly understand the
limited sense in which the word must here be used.

The dweller in Cornwall comes in time to perceive the constant
recurrence of various types of man. Of these, two at least are well
marked, very common, and probably of great antiquity and
significance. The man of the first type is slender, lithe,
graceful, usually rather short; the face is smooth and delicately
outlined, without bony prominences, the eyebrows finely pencilled.
The character is on the whole charming, volatile, vivacious, but
not always reliable, and while quickwitted, rarely capable of
notable achievement or strenuous endeavour. It is a distinctly
feminine type. The other type is large and solid, often with much
crispy hair on the face and shaggy eyebrows. The arches over the
eyes are well marked and the jaws massive; the bones generally are
developed in these persons, though they would scarcely be described
as raw-boned; in its extreme form a face of this type has a rugged
prognathous character which seems to belong to a lower race. The
women are solid and vigorous in appearance, with fully-developed
breasts and hips, in marked contrast with the first type, but
resembling the women met with in Central and Western France.
Indeed, the people of this type generally recall a certain French
type, grave, self-possessed, deliberate in movement, capable and
reliable in character.

I mention these two types because they seem to me to represent
the two oldest races of Cornwall, or, indeed, of England. The first
corresponds to the British Neolithic man—as described by
Garson and other cautious investigators of recent date—who
held sway in England before the so-called Kelts arrived, and who
probably belonged to the so-called Iberian race; in pictures of
Spanish women of the best period, indeed, and in some parts of
modern Spain we may still see the same type. The second corresponds
to the more powerful, and also, as his remains show, more cultured
and aesthetic Kelt, who came from France and Belgium, driving the
Neolithic man into the fortified hill-dwellings which abound in
West Cornwall as well as in some other parts of Southern England.
Here the Neolithic people may have dwelt until they adopted the
language and higher civilisation of the sturdier Kelts, or perhaps
until they were reconciled in the face of common foes. When
craniologists assert that Cornish heads sometimes show French
affinities, sometimes Spanish, we must put this fact down, not, as
is sometimes done, to recent accidental crossing, but to the
survival of two aboriginal elements in the population. When these
types of individual are well combined, the results are often very
attractive. We then meet with what is practically a third type:
large, dignified, handsome people, distinguished from the
Anglo-Saxon not only by their prominent noses and well-formed
chins, but also by their unaffected grace and refinement of manner.
In many a little out-of-the-world Cornish farm I have met the men
of this type, and admired the distinction of their appearance and
bearing, their natural, instinctive courtesy, their kindly
hospitality. It was surely of such men that Queen Elizabeth thought
when she asserted that all Cornishmen are courtiers.

I do not wish to insist too strongly on these types which blend
into one another, and may even be found in the same family. The
Anglo-Saxon stranger, who has yet had no time to distinguish them,
and who comes, let us say, from a typically English county like
Lancashire, still finds much that is unfamiliar in the people he
meets. They strike him as rather a dark race, lithe in movement,
after the manner of sailors and fishermen, and their hands and feet
are small. Their hair has a tendency to curl, and their
complexions, even those of the men, are often incomparable. This
last character is due to the extremely moist climate of Cornwall,
swept on both sides by the sea-laden winds of the Atlantic. In the
same way the traveller southwards through Provencal France, when at
length he reaches the Mediterranean, is impressed by the fresh,
fair cheeks of the Marseillaises; and I have never anywhere in the
world so fully realised the loveliness of a fair complexion as in
the faces of Englishwomen newly arrived among the dry, harsh skins
one sees in rainless Australia. More than by this, however, the
stranger accustomed to the heavy, awkward ways of the Anglo-Saxon
clodhopper will be struck by the bright, independent intelligence
and the facility of speech which he finds here. The work, as one
finds later, may be ill done, it will certainly be done with
deliberation, but the worker is quick-witted, and, rightly or
wrongly, he retains a certain superiority over his work. No
disguise can cover the rusticity of the English rustic; on Cornish
roads one may often meet a carman whose clear-cut face, bushy
moustache, and general bearing might easily add distinction to Pall
Mall.

A very marked trait of the Cornish is their independence. Far
more innately than the inhabitants of any other part of England,
these people are democrats. They may not hold more advanced
political views, but they have a more instinctive dignity and
self-respect, a more natural and matter-of-course sense of
equality. It may be seen in little matters; the use of the
obsequious "Sir" (a matter of inflection, be it noted, for we have
the contemptuous "Sir" of Dr. Johnson, the American's non-committal
"Sir," the Frenchman's purely courteous "Monsieur ") as well as the
touching of caps, so widespread in England generally, are not
prevalent in Cornwall. The Cornish-man, if possible, always
addresses you by your name. Democracy in the Anglo-Saxon is often a
mere blustering revolt against servility. He asserts his equality
with the mere snobbish assertiveness of the man who has no sense of
equality in his soul. The Cornishman's sense of equality is so
deep-rooted that nothing can perturb his friendly courtesy to
social superiors, and when the shocked middle-class Anglo-Saxon
stiffly draws back, the Cornishman puts it down to the eccentric
pride of "up-along" folk. It is noteworthy that the conception of
democracy as a spiritual grace, not to be found by much seeking,
has throughout inspired a distinguished Cornish-man of to-day,
Edward Carpenter, in writing his Towards Democracy. This
democratic instinct is a very ancient trait in the Cornish
character. The American who visits England is impressed by the
persistence of the feudal spirit. That spirit, undoubtedly, with
the servile dependence and swaggering revolt from dependence which
it engenders, is the great enemy of democracy. But feudalism with
difficulty penetrated into Cornwall, never took root there, and
faded away at an early period. The temper of the race, while not
opposed to voluntary communistic co-operation, as we may still see
among the fishermen, is distinctly averse to the subordination and
unquestioning obedience of patriarchal feudalism.

The special characters of the race are often vividly shown in
its women. I am not aware that they have ever played a large part
in the world, whether in life or art. But they are memorable enough
for their own qualities. Many years ago, as a student in a large
London hospital, I had under my care a young girl who came from
labour of the lowest and least skilled order. Yet there was an
instinctive grace and charm in all her ways and speech which
distinguished her utterly from the rough women of her class. I was
puzzled then over that delightful anomaly. In after years,
recalling her name and her appearance, I knew that she was Cornish,
and I am puzzled no longer.

I have since seen the same ways, the same soft, winning speech
equally unimpaired by hard work and rude living. The Cornish woman
possesses an adroitness and self-possession, a modulated readiness
of speech, far removed from the awkward heartiness of the
Anglo-Saxon woman, the emotional inexpressiveness of the Lancashire
lass whose eyes wander around as she seeks for words, perhaps
completing her unfinished sentence by a snap of the fingers. The
Cornish woman—at all events while she is young and not
submerged by the drudgery of life—exhibits a certain
delightful volatility and effervescence. In this respect she has
some affinity with the bewitching and distracting heroines of
Thomas Hardy's novels—for instance, the little schoolmistress
of Under the Greenwood Tree—doubtless because the
Wessex folk of the same south coast are akin to the Cornish. The
Cornish girl is inconsistent without hypocrisy; she is not ashamed
of work, but she is very fond of jaunts, and on such occasions she
dresses herself, it would perhaps be rash to say with more zeal
than the Anglo-Saxon maiden, but usually with more success. She is
an assiduous chapel-goer, equally assiduous in flirtation when
chapel is over. The pretty Sunday-school teacher and leader of the
local Band of Hope cheerfully confesses as she drinks off the glass
of claret you offer her that she is but a poor teetotaler. The
Cornish woman will sometimes have a baby before she is legally
married; it is only an old custom of the country, though less
deeply rooted than the corresponding custom in Wales. After she has
married, her man perhaps leaves her to go to America or the Cape,
and disappears; in a few years she may marry again. One sometimes
wonders how far the volatile and mercurial element in the Cornish
woman, the delightful inconsistency of the race generally, may not
be associated with the climate of this land of sunshine and shower,
with its perpetual rainbows hovering over the waters, and its heady
Atlantic winds from the west. These mighty winds that rise up at
night to howl, and whistle, and roar, have much to answer for in
the physical conformation of the land; they have swept the soil
until the rocks are bare, they have made the life of the woods
impossible for all but the smallest and hardiest trees, they have
piled up the sea-sand into dunes that have buried churches. The
wind in Cornwall is a more powerful factor in life than elsewhere.
Sudden changes in the wind here strangely stimulate and exhaust the
nervous system, both in the natives and in strangers. The people
themselves, realising this, regard the wind as a cause of disease;
the wind has got into his head (they say), or his throat, or his
belly, as the case may be.

Vivacious and intelligent as the Cornish people are, they seem
to be, for the most part, inapt for strenuous intellectual effort.
Cornwall has no famous thinkers to set against the Abelard, the
Descartes, and many another only less famous, produced by an allied
soil and allied race in Brittany. Sir Humphry Davy was scarcely a
philosopher, but his name is the chief that comes into the mind.
With his impressive personality, his eloquence, his brilliant and
many-sided versatility, Davy is typical of the Cornish spirit at
its finest, just as his contemporary, Dalton—rough, simple,
unaffected, untiringly patient and plodding—represents the
northern Anglo-Saxon. One other name Cornwall has to show in the
highest sphere of science: Adams, the astronomer and mathematician,
who is for ever associated with the stupendous feat of discovering
Neptune. In general literature, on the other hand, especially what
used to be called belles lettres, the Cornish show very
well. George Borrow was only half a Cornishman, but the whole
temper of the man and his work—the brave and cheerful
adventurousness, the happy insight into varied and morbid moods,
even the unconscious incongruity of the religious element—are
very Cornish indeed. Trelawney was a true Cornishman in every
sense, and his Adventures constitute the ideal history of
the typical Cornishman. "Peter Pindar," again, represents the
Cornish adventurer in literature under his least amiable aspects,
while Praed shows him under pleasanter aspects. Among greater men
Keats is sometimes mentioned in connection with Cornwall; it is
not, indeed, definitely known whether the father of Keats came from
Cornwall or Devonshire, but if not of Cornish he was evidently of
allied race. The genius of the Bronte family is always associated
with the eccentric Irish father; it must be added that the genius
was not made manifest until the Irish was blended with Cornish
stock. In our own day it seems to me that the characteristics of
the Cornish spirit are well exemplified in a young poet and critic
who is of purely Cornish race, Mr. Arthur Symons. Mention must also
be made of the group of novelists—such as Mr. Quiller-Couch,
Mr. Lowry, and Mr. Pearce—who have devoted themselves with
delicate artistic fidelity to the delineation of their land and its
people.

II

The Cornishman possesses various artistic aptitudes, but on the
whole they are not of the plastic order. A certain amount of taste
in trivial detail, a love of colour, may be noted, but no great
painters come from Cornwall as from East Anglia and other more
Scandinavian parts of Great Britain. Reynolds, indeed, belonged to
Plymouth, just over the border, but Opie, the portrait painter, and
Bone, the miniaturist, seem to be the only Cornish artists to be
found until recent times. Brittany is similarly bare of great
painters. Nor is there much to say for Cornish architecture. Now
and again one meets with an old house that has its charm of
fitness, but on the whole they are far less common than the old
farmhouses of the North with their grave simplicity and harmony;
nor is there anything to compare with the cheerful felicity which
the art of domestic architecture reached in West Surrey and
Hampshire. The cause of this lack lies doubtless in material. In
the absence of stone, wood, and tiles, the Cornish have had to
wrestle with the problems offered by so rebellious a substance as
granite. There are not even many notable churches in this land of
saints; Launceston church-tower is an exception. St. Buryan's, in
its austere simplicity, impresses the traveller as he circles
around it in his progress through the Land's End district. The
noblest and most satisfying fragment of ecclesiastical architecture
in Cornwall is, without doubt, the tower of Probus church, near
Truro. The church itself is insignificant, but the tower, built in
Elizabethan days though reminiscent of an earlier period of art, is
admirable at every point. One vainly seeks to know how so
insignificant a village acquired so stately a possession. I have
many times spent weeks beneath its shadow, and from afar or near I
have never failed to thrill with pleasure as I caught sight of its
large and gracious proportions, its fitness of detail, the soft
grey tones of its delicately diapered walls.

An aptitude for music and singing is the most characteristic
artistic faculty of the Cornish, and there is even some reason for
supposing that the greatest of English composers, Purcell, belonged
to Cornwall. We must certainly connect this aptitude with the
beautifully modulated speech of the people, the unconscious
tendency to soften and broaden ordinary English, and their gift of
eloquence; for like the Welsh and the Irish—though to a less
extent than these latter—the Cornish are speakers and
preachers. Certain parts of the county, like Zennor, have an
ancient reputation for beauty of voice; the fame of Incledon lives
to our own time, and various noted singers of to-day are of Cornish
race. This musical endowment is radical in the race. Up to the
seventeenth century miracle-plays remained very popular in
Cornwall, as various open amphitheatres on the hillsides remain to
testify. The Cornish Mysteries are held to differ from those of
other parts chiefly by their superiority in form, in accuracy of
rhythm and rhyme, and in adaptability for lyrical expression; so
strong, indeed, is the musical element that they are usually, it
has been said, the libretti of religious operas, while instead of
closing with a Te Deum, as is customary in English and
French Mysteries, they end by directing the minstrels to "pipe
diligently that we may go to dance." Musical antiquaries hold that
the modern carol—which is really a choral song somewhat less
serious than a hymn, and accompanied by a dance—is a relic of
the choruses sung between the acts of miracle-plays. In most
English towns the carol has degenerated into some vulgar modern
jingle, some "'Ark! the 'erald angels sing," hastily yelled by
small ragamuffins anxious for a copper. In Cornwall it remains a
more serious matter. The young men of the village, for some time
before Christinas, practise together the traditional part-songs,
which are very quaint and delightful to listen to. When Christmas
Eve conies they go round singing from house to house, and the
poorest Cornish householder gladly pays his shilling—a
considerable sum here—in return for this little concert
outside his door.

The Cornish love of music, and also of dancing, appears in
various old rites and customs that have not yet died out. Furry
day, which is celebrated at Helston, in the Lizard district, during
the first week of May, is perhaps the most remarkable of these
festivals. On this day the inhabitants of the town, including the
Mayor and "best families," dance along the open streets and in and
out of a large number of the houses, all knocking at the door as
they dance in. The dance is a sort of polka, and the accompanying
town-band plays a very lively traditional air, which, it is said,
may also be found in Brittany and Wales. For two hours this dance
continues without intermission beneath the warm sun which is not
unknown to a Cornish May. Watching the perspiring actors in this
quaint survival from the antique world, I can well believe the
statement I overheard one young lady among them make, that it was
the hardest day's work she had ever done. It would, however, be a
mistake to suppose that this now meaningless celebration is kept up
from any sense of duty. It is the buoyant nervous excitability of
the race which makes the people of Helston cling to a festival
which is unparalleled in any English town.

The volatility of the Cornish, however exuberantly effervescent,
rarely passes into the rowdyism and horseplay which are still so
painfully common among the true-born English. Even the Cornish
Mysteries, it appears, are singularly free from the coarse
buffoonery which usually characterised those clerical productions.
When Cornish lads to-day ramble abroad you will not find them
engaged in creating the maximum of noisy mischief. And when you lie
in your bed in the West End of London, and are awakened in the
early hours of Sunday morning by ugly voices howling discordantly
the noisiest music-hall song to the cackling accompaniment of
reckless laughter, you may be fairly sure that these people were
not born in Cornwall. This is one of the characters which bring the
Cornish near to the French; it may merely indicate difference in
nervous texture, but it adds to the amenity of life.

The genius of the race—its volatility and its power of
speech—is well-fitted for the actor's profession. The
tendency may be seen among village lads, who will sometimes
organise a nigger-minstrel company, in elaborate costume, to go
from house to house performing variety entertainment. Foote, a
famous actor of old time, once called "the English Aristophanes,"
belonged to Cornwall, and the greatest English actor of our own
day, Sir Henry Irving, though not actually born in Cornwall,
belongs to the county, both by race (on the maternal side) and by
the fact that he spent his early youth there.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the favourite avocations
and amusements of the Cornish are all effeminate. No one who is
acquainted with Cornish wrestling will rush to that conclusion.
Nowadays, indeed, wrestling in Cornwall is dying out, and I have
not often had an opportunity of witnessing it, but it is by no
means extinct. I know a village, far removed from railway stations
and the currents of modern life, where it may be well studied.
Behind the chief inn in the village is a large field. Here, on a
certain day every year, several hundred people assemble and seat
themselves on chairs and benches, forming a large ring left free
for the wrestlers, who strive the whole day long in round after
round to throw one another according to the rules of the art. They
are practically naked above the waist, for the strong loose canvas
jacket is easily lifted over the shoulders. It is a graceful and
vigorous performance, not without a certain solemnity befitting a
survival from the early world. No one is hurt, however decisive the
falls, for there is nothing of the reckless barbarity of football,
so dear to the hearts of the northern English countrymen. There are
no women present, though a few may be seen flitting in the
background and gazing on furtively. Beer is passed round from time
to time to the onlookers, who sedately discuss the performance with
the air of connoisseurs, applaud the victors, and quietly disperse
in the evening.

The stranger in Cornwall is quickly impressed by something wild
and primitive in the land and the people. To a large extent this is
a correct impression. The general contours of the
country—huge fantastic rocks lashed by angry winter seas,
gorse-covered moorlands with but rare luxuriant valleys—are
savage and uncivilised. The prehistoric remains—the frequent
monoliths, the "quoits" as cromlechs are here called, the
mysterious circles of stones—confirm the impression and
recall the grander relics of primitive rite and sepulture in
Brittany, while the quaint wayside crosses scattered so profusely
along western Cornish roads recall the simple piety of early days.
The people themselves also often retain a certain element of
savagery, as apt when irritated to break out in bursts of violent
anger as their shallow soil to reveal the hard rock underneath, or
their sudden gales to lash the sea into white fury. They have a
primitive instinct for religion, though perhaps to a less extent
than the Welsh or the Bretons; they were ardent Catholics in days
of old, they never took kindly to a State Church as invented by
Henry VIII, but when Wesley came among them and made a spiritual
faith once more possible they became ardent Methodists. They have
also been devoted wreckers, fervent smugglers. Even now it is
possible to point to men who in their early days, it is said, lured
vessels to destruction on the rocks. They carried their smuggling
audacity so far as in one case at least to use a church for storing
the smuggled spirits, carefully removing them on Saturday nights in
preparation for the religious rites of the Sunday. Doubtless these
things have died out, and nowadays the Cornish display their
fervour in rescuing life at such times as the fierce winter gales
turn the dangerous coasts around the Lizard and Land's End into
seething cauldrons of death, in which the lifeboat cannot live and
the rocket cannot pierce the wind to bring rescue to the sailors
who drop one by one from the rigging to their death, within a few
yards of land. The man who would once have been a wrecker is
perhaps the man who now spends days and nights in searching for
dead bodies along the coasts. To live on the Cornish coast breeds a
certain familiarity with death, and also that terror of the
devouring sea which is deeply rooted in the people, and a little
surprising to the careless summer pleasure-seekers who bathe all
day long in these clear sparkling waters and cool mysterious caves.
But the natives see it differently, and in many districts there are
few women who have not lost one of their men—a son, a father,
a husband, sometimes drowned beneath their eyes. The life of the
people, and perhaps their racial instincts, are primitive also in
their attachment to superstitions. All sorts of pagan survivals may
be found in Cornwall: holy wells are numerous; every district has
its population of ghosts, and many are the natives who have seen or
heard them. Witchcraft was of old strongly rooted in Cornwall,
especially in particular spots, such as St. Ives. It is not yet
extinct, and the witch-doctor still mutters her spells for the
benefit of those who seek her advice. I know of a respectable
citizen of a Cornish town who found his orthodox doctor's remedies
too slow, and went off to a famous witch-doctor who uttered her
spells over him; he was perfectly satisfied with the results. This
man made no secret of the course he had adopted, apparently
regarding his preference for the powers of darkness over the powers
of potions as justified by more speedy results. There must
certainly be a far larger number of persons who resort to these
same powers in secret. While the Cornish are truly primitive in the
sense that they still retain traditions, habits, arid customs now
unknown to the rest of England, it must be added that they have
little of the profound conservatism of the Welsh, which has kept
the old Keltic tongue alive and vigorous within a few hundred miles
of London, just as they lack also the intense moral fervour of the
Breton. In the Cornish rustic there is even a certain eagerness for
novelty; you may see his whole body astir with delight at some new
spectacle at which the Anglo-Saxon would only gape in wonderment.
What seems to us the primitiveness of the Cornish is largely, it
appears to me, an organic character of the race which civilisation
can scarcely be expected to efface, a radical matter of
temperament. The Anglo-Saxon character comports a certain exterior
awkwardness, a more or less genial ruffianism, beneath which you
find on cutting into it—though this may not be easy to
effect—a reliable depth of juicy beefiness. When you scratch
the gentle surface of the Cornish soul you may, perchance, strike
on some unexpected resonant resistance, even with ugly sparks of
fire, just as when you penetrate the shallow soil of Cornish land
you strike on hard metalliferous strata. I do not wish to insinuate
that either of these tempers is of higher quality. The one is not
quite so smooth as it looks, the other not quite so rough. In the
world of character it is not so easy, as it is in the world of
zoology, to assert that the creature which carries its skeleton
inside is more highly organised than that which carries it outside.
But the ready responsiveness of the Cornish temperament, its
unexpected recoils and resistances, its apparent contradictions,
are fascinating, and constitute a character which appeals to us as
primitive.

In a last analysis, perhaps the most distinctive and interesting
element in the Cornish character is its adventurousness. Here the
restless, nervous energy in the race, and the underlying
sturdiness—Cornish gales and Cornish granite—are
combined and displayed in splendid achievement. It is a mistake to
imagine that the Anglo-Saxon race is adventurous in a conspicuous
degree. The Englishman is an excellent colonist, no doubt, solid
and tenacious, but not quick to "trek" on into the unknown until
well convinced that his present state is intolerable. The Scotch,
the Irish, and the Cornish have been the chief pioneers, leading
forlorn hopes to 'outposts which the more stolid English have
afterwards held and maintained. The names of great travellers,
adventurers, and pioneers are enough to indicate that we English,
in the narrow sense of the word, do not greatly predominate among
them, and the same fact is clear to anyone who has ever lived in
any outpost of English-speaking civilisation. The Cornish
seaports—Fowey, Falmouth, St. Ives, Padstow—have sent
out numberless sailors and adventurers in Elizabethan days and
after. During the last half-century these have been joined by the
men who are cast adrift through the decay of Cornish mining.
Cornishmen are found to-day in all parts of the world—in
America, Australia, and Africa. South Africa is especially the
resort of the Cornish, and the Cornishman at home pronounces with
far more familiarity the name of Johannesburg than that of London,
a remote city, mentioned, perhaps, with some condescension, and not
bulking so largely in the Cornishman's eyes as Plymouth, the great
seaport of emigration, which lies almost within his own boundaries.
The Cornish often settle abroad, but they return more frequently
than do the Anglo-Saxon English, who, if less keen to go, are also
less keen to return. In every part of Cornwall you find men who
have wandered through the world, and have come back, with or
without a small competency, to end their days in their own land.
The joy of adventure is dearer to the Cornish heart than the
accumulation of wealth. It is this adventurousness which has given
the Cornish the felicity of playing so large a part in the history
of English civilisation. The Welsh have never reconciled themselves
to conquest, the Irish have never even recognised their conquest,
the Cornish have riot seldom put themselves at the head of their
conquerors. There are many Cornish families, like the Killigrews
and the Godolphins, who have attained distinguished preeminence in
every department of practical affairs, statesmanship, diplomacy,
divinity, law. Great soldiers and sailors Cornwall has produced in
abundance. Sir Richard Grenville—whose exploits were
celebrated by his like-minded kinsman, Sir Walter Raleigh, and in a
later day by Tennyson—is one of the first among English
heroes; the same exuberantly heroic family yielded Sir Bevill
Grenville, "the Cornish Bayard." Sir John Eliot, the revolutionary
patriot and orator, was also a Cornishman When times changed,
Cornwall sent out missionary adventurers like Henry Martyn, and
explorers like Richard Lander, while in still later days the daring
of the Cornish has been chiefly shown in the creation of new ideals
in literature and morals. The long list of Cornish worthies is
little more than a series of pioneers into the physical and
spiritual worlds.

IX. SOEUR JEANNE DES ANGES

Published in 1899 in the UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE AND FREE REVIEW,
edited and published by Dr. de Villiers who had taken the FREE
REVIEW over from the (now) Right Hon. J. M. Robertson, and in the
previous year had published the first volume of my STUDIES IN THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX. De Villiers, the son of a German judge, was an
extraordinary man who, it ultimately appeared, lived a life of
mystification passing over into criminality, though by no means an
ordinary criminal. Finally, to avoid arrest, he sought refuge in a
concealed room of his house in Cambridge, and there committed
suicide with the aid of poison he had long carried about in a ring
he wore.

THERE is no form of literature so fascinating and so instructive
to the student of human nature as autobiography. The confessions
left by Augustine, Bunyan, Cellini, Casanova, Rousseau, can never
lose either their interest or their psychological value. Novels
become unintelligible, histories need to be re-written, but the
intimate record of the soul's experiences is always new.

La Possession de la Mere Jeanne des Anges, Superieure des
Religieuses Ursulines de Loudun (known in the world as Mlle de
Belcier) cannot be said to stand in the first rank of great
autobiographies. Yet it is singularly interesting and instructive.
There is perhaps no other document in existence—not even the
Life of Saint Theresa—which shows how large and tragic
a part in human affairs may be played by hysteria. Since hysteria,
in its myriad forms, is just as prevalent in the nineteenth as in
the seventeenth century, and plays an equally prominent part in
life, it may not be out of place to call the reader's attention to
the existence of this autobiography, discovered a few years ago in
the Communal Library at Tours, and admirably edited, under the
superintendence of Charcot, by Drs. Legue and Gilles de la
Tourette. Mile de Belcier was born in the Chateau of Cozes, in
Saintonge, on February 2nd, 1602, being the daughter of a great
seigneur, Messire Louis Belcier, Baron of Cozes. She was a puny
child, ill-developed physically, of bizarre temper, and at the age
of ten was sent to be educated at a convent where her aunt was
prioress. But here her conduct was so unbearable, and her tastes so
ill-regulated, that when she had reached the age of fifteen her
aunt sent her home in despair. At home neither good advice nor
severe punishment were spared on the rebellious daughter, and
growing weary of both at last she resolved to take the veil. The
lack of vocation appeared absolute, but no doubt the parents
welcomed this caprice as a solution of their difficulties, and sent
their daughter to the Ursulines, who had just established a house
at Poitiers. Here the young novice showed somewhat excessive zeal.
She was, for instance, attracted to diseased persons, and liked to
dress the most repulsive wounds. During her noviciate she lost six
of her brothers and sisters, one of them being killed by the
English at Rhe, and her parents tried to induce her to return to
their desolate home, but in vain, the final vows being pronounced
in 1623.

At the same time, however, the religious community in which she
lived began to perceive many defects in Jeanne de Belcier's
character. She was fantastic, vain, dissembling. But all
remonstrances remained without effect; they only served to make
Soeur Jeanne think of leaving the convent, and as the convent was
poor, and Soeur Jeanne was rich, the sisters endeavoured to
reconcile themselves to her caprices. When it was proposed to
establish a new Ursuline house at Loudun she succeeded in being
nominated one of the eight founders. At Loudun, Sceur Jeanne
surprised all her companions; she was submissive, even humble;
wholly pre-occupied with the idea of being made superior of the
convent. Before long she was successful, and at the age of
twenty-five she found herself at the head of a convent of
constantly growing importance. Having thus achieved the object of
her ambition, she quickly fell into her old habits, threw off all
restraint, and gave a free rein to her whims. Her pride and
intolerance made the lives of the sisters unbearable, while she
spent whole days in the convent parlour enjoying the scandal of the
town. No one at Loudun was so well informed as Soeur Jeanne. At
that time a priest named Urbain Grandier—the history of whose
tragic fate has been recorded in full detail—chiefly occupied
the scandal-mongers of Loudun. Proud, handsome, sensual—and
giving free rein to his sensuality—he was yet a man of marked
intellectual ability, and gifted with persuasive eloquence. Such a
man especially fascinates and subdues the imagination of women.
Jeanne, with her passionate and unwholesome curiosity, could not
fail to experience the magic charm of Grandier, and she resolved to
find some opportunity of entering into relationship with him.

Jeanne herself was not without powers of seduction. She was
small, indeed, and her shoulders were deformed—though she
showed skill in disguising this deformity—but her face was
beautiful, her eyes bright, and she was proud of her beauty.
Moreover, the charm of her conversation was notable. She set
herself to obtain Grandier as spiritual director of her convent.
The reply was a direct refusal, and Jeanne had little difficulty in
placing the responsibility for this reply with Madeline de Bron,
Grandier's favourite mistress. Jeanne's next step was to obtain as
spiritual director a priest who was violently hostile to Grandier.
We may note that, notwithstanding her pre-occupation with
Grandier's personality, Jeanne had never seen him.

A few months later she fell into a state of severe anaemia, and
showed signs of nervous affection, aggravated by the reading of
many mystical books. She was now subject to nocturnal
hallucinations, and seemed to see Grandier approaching her, radiant
with a fascinating beauty, overwhelming her with caresses and
amorous proposals. She finally confided these visions of the night
to her companions, being careful to add that she had courageously
resisted the solicitations of the tempter. To overwhelm the tempter
with more certain defeat, several of the nuns, with Jeanne at their
head, prayed and fasted, and administered to themselves corporal
discipline. The result was that in a few days several nuns
experienced similar visions. Then the honest but superstitious
spiritual director—whose hostility to Grandier has already
been mentioned—began to suspect the influence of Satan, and
to talk of demoniacal possession. All the enemies of Grandier were
apprised of what was going on among the Ursuline nuns, and it began
to be noised abroad that Grandier had bewitched them. Exorcism was
attempted; wild terror ruled in the convent, and this nervous
excitement brought on a violent convulsive attack. Hitherto Jeanne
had shown little more than a marked congenital predisposition to
hysteria. Now the seal of the demon was definitely set upon her.
Great was the consternation of the community at so visible an
eruption of Satan, and the nuns who witnessed the scene were one by
one swept into the same whirlpool of erotic delirium and
convulsion. The convulsions soon ceased after the Archbishop of
Bordeaux had wisely put a stop to the exorcisms, but now Jeanne
suffered much from haemorrhages and anemia, which naturally
aggravated her hallucinations. At night she and the other sisters
might be seen, like bacchantes, possessed by erotic mania, rushing
through the alleys of the convent garden, haunted by the image of
Grandier whom they had never seen.

Then a relation of Jeanne's, Laubardemont, a man described as
the genius of evil and a creature of Richelieu's, whose ear he
possessed, arrived upon the scene. He witnessed the turbulent
manifestations at the convent; he learnt that Grandier had opposed
certain schemes of Richelieu which Laubardemont had been appointed
to execute. In a few weeks, by Richelieu's orders, Grandier was in
prison. The exorcisms were re-established, and, of course, the
demoniacal manifestations were re-doubled, Jeanne standing out
prominently by the obscenity of her language and conduct, when
under the evil spirit's influence. It was in vain that Grandier
proved his absolute innocence; the precise testimony of Satan
himself, through the mouths of Jeanne and her companions, could not
be gainsaid. At five o'clock on the morning of August 18th, 1634,
the commission, presided over by Laubardemont, condemned the
unhappy priest to be burnt alive on that same day. He was first
conducted to the torture chamber where two monks, the Reverend
Fathers Tranquille and Lactance, themselves hammered in the wedges
to break the legs of the victim—who behaved throughout with
admirable courage and resignation—and then accompanied him to
the stake in the market-place, where they forbade the execution of
the merciful rule of first strangling the victim, and themselves
lighted the fire. It is a sad satisfaction, for the honour of
humanity, to learn that these two reverend fathers, together with
several magistrates, surgeons, and others concerned in this affair,
died insane.

Jeanne's hysterical condition was, however, radically
established, and the death of Grandier merely served to change its
manifestations which she has herself fully recorded. At one stage
it was again resolved to apply exorcism, and the choice of the
exorciser brings another element, of almost ludicrous pathos, into
the narrative. Surin, the Jesuit father selected, was about the
same age as Soeur Jeanne, now thirty-two, and was himself also
profoundly hysterical, suffering from continual severe headache,
together with many of the same nervous symptoms which Jeanne
displayed, including the temptations of the same demon of impurity,
Isacaaron. Thus was Satan appointed to cast out Satan.

Father Surin left Jeanne no rest day nor night. He made her
appear before him completely naked, and with the object of
chastising Isacaaron, ordered her to flagellate herself. These
orders Jeanne duly executed, feeling nothing of the flagellation,
and scarcely knowing what was said or done, except that a confused
memory remained with her that she had undressed and dressed
herself.

This Jesuit father was no ordinary victim of hysteria. He was a
mystic whose literary works—especially his Spiritual Guide
to Perfection and his Triumph of Divine Love—have
been devoutly reprinted even in the present century. The contact of
two such persons, both of unusual ability, both wrought up to the
highest pitch of nervous exaltation, could not fail to be without
result: a period of miracles began.

Father Surin, however, won no credit for the inauguration of
this new era. The only immediate result of his spiritual attentions
was a distinct further injury both to his own health and Jeanne's,
and he was speedily superseded by another Jesuit. Then it was that,
apparently suffering from severe pleurisy, for which she was
repeatedly bled, she seemed at the point of death. Extreme unction
was administered, and while the bystanders were awaiting her last
moments, the dying woman suddenly sat up, her face radiantly
beautiful, and exclaimed that she was cured. She had had a vision
in which St. Joseph appeared to her bearing a balm of exquisite
odour. He would not himself apply it to her side "on account of his
well-known modesty," but Jeanne's guardian-angel, having, we are
told, no such scruples, rubbed the balm on to the affected part,
producing immediate relief, In proof of this, five large and
deliciously perfumed spots were found on Jeanne's shift. (It may
not be out of place to mention that Jeanne was specially skilful in
the manufacture of ointments, and spent considerable time in
preparing them.) The shift was cut in half horizontally by the
Ursulines a few days later, the lower and less sacred portion being
thrown away, and the upper half, having first been suspended by a
thread near the five odoriferous spots to keep that portion out of
the water, carefully washed and preserved, to play a large part in
Jeanne's subsequent career.

That career lasted for twenty-seven years longer, but gradually
changed its character. Jeanne is now no longer the mere victim of
Satan; she is something of a saint, and she travels triumphantly
through France, bearing pity and healing with her. She exhibits the
holy shift to the reverent eyes of the King and Cardinal Richelieu,
and even the Queen (Anne of Austria) vainly implores from her the
gift of one of those sacred grease-spots.* Wherever she goes
thousands come forth to meet her, and everywhere miracles are
effected. Jeanne, in addition, now bore about on her body another
proof of the miraculous interference of heaven. Father Surin, after
two years' absence from Loudun, had returned, and had succeeded in
expelling from Jeanne, Behemoth, one of the devils who possessed
her. As a proof of his submission, Behemoth was commanded to write
the names of Jesus, Mary, and others on Jeanne's hand. This
suggestion, as sometimes happens in the hysterical, was successful,
and for a long period these names were constantly renewed, to the
admiration of the devout and the confusion of the sceptical.

[* Soeur Jeanne gives a full account of the
interview with the great cardinal. He was in bed suffering with
hemorrhoids and also from a tumour in the arm. "On seeing the
fragment of shift on which was the unction," she writes, "he was
touched with respect and expressed great sentiments of piety, for
before taking it in his hands, though he was ill, he uncovered his
head, smelled it and kissed it twice, saying: 'That smells
perfectly good.' He made it touch a reliquary which he had at the
head of the bed, and while he was holding the shift with respect
and admiration, I narrated to him how I had been cured by the power
of St. Joseph and the application of the unction." But no
beneficial effect was produced either on the haemorrhoids or on the
tumour.]

All these events, and many others which are full of instruction,
alike for the student of human nature, of history, and of the
phenomena of hysteria, are recorded in detail by Jeanne herself,
with a full sense of the importance of the manifestations in which
she had played the chief part, but simply and sincerely, honestly
attempting to distinguish what seemed to her to be her own share in
events, and what was attributable to the influence of bad or good
spirits. As time wore on, her hallucinations became changed in
character; she dreamed of union with Christ. The carnal temptations
still appeared from time to time, and she vainly sought to subdue
them "by rolling on thorns and hot coals, without relief." She was
re-elected prioress, and in later years her rule was very severe.
She became paralysed and died on January 29th, 1665. A few months
later, Father Surin, overwhelmed by physical infirmities, committed
suicide. It was rumoured that Jeanne died in the odour of sanctity.
The sisters deposited her head in a superb reliquary, and for more
than a century this little head, that had been the seat of such
intense nervous activity and had enacted so many tragedies and
comedies in the world, received the veneration of the devout who
travelled to Loudun. After that the Ursu-lines of Loudun fell upon
days of misfortune and disrepute, and were finally suppressed by
the Bishop of Poitiers, a few years before the Revolution. Then the
relics, head and shift alike, disappeared, and the most careful
researches of recent days have been fruitless to ascertain either
their present resting-place or their fate. Even Jeanne's history
has been forgotten, passionately as it once moved the emotions of
men and moulded their fates, only to be reconstructed by the
erudite from forgotten treatises and mouldy manuscripts. As
reconstructed, it is a pathetic record, and a symbol of those
unwholesome mists of the brain by which, now as much as ever, men
seek to shut out themselves and others from the eternal
sunshine.

X. THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL
BIOGRAPHY

This paper consists of critical reflections on THE DICTIONARY
OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY suggested by the careful study of that
DICTIONARY which I made in preparation for my STUDY or BRITISH
GENIUS, published in 1901. The present paper was published in the
ARGOSY for November, 1900.

THE issue of the sixty-third and concluding volume of the
Dictionary of National Biography brings to an end a literary
task of imposing magnitude. The extent of the work may be estimated
from the fact that two supplementary volumes have been necessary in
order to gather in those great Englishmen who have had time to die
in the long interval which has elapsed in the progress from A to Z.
With these additional volumes the Dictionary will be brought
down to the close of the nineteenth century and will cover
altogether about fifteen hundred years. It may be indeed that there
is a tendency to overestimate the magnitude of this great
work—so happily begun under the inspiration of Mr. Leslie
Stephen and now so happily completed under the direction of Mr.
Sidney Lee—and to regard it as a unique literary achievement.
This it can scarcely claim to be. Not to refer to the endless task,
perhaps too often mentioned as a supreme monument of
erudition—the Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum—one may
remark that the Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences
Medicates is a vaster and more wide-ranging work; while,
confining ourselves to our own country, the series of translations
of religious texts edited by Professor Max Mueller, though somewhat
smaller in extent, is of more original conception and epoch-making
importance, and the English Dictionary now being edited by
Professor Murray represents a greater amount of labour and minute
erudition. At the same time the Dictionary of National
Biography is a sufficiently great literary monument to be able
to dispense with extravagant laudation; a very necessary and
laborious piece of work has here been accomplished, and we now
possess an adequate and interesting summary of the achievements, in
every field, of the sons and daughters of Great Britain.

This Dictionary, indeed, for the first time enables us to
form any reliable estimate of the special qualities of the English
genius, and the precise contribution which the men and women of
Great Britain have made to civilisation. Its worth can only be
realised by one who has investigated it from this point of view. As
I have selected the Dictionary as a convenient basis for a
psychological study of the greatest English men and women, and with
this object have read most of the longer articles with careful
scrutiny, I am probably in a better position than most to
appreciate the strong points and the weak points of this great
undertaking.

I do not purpose to summarise here the results of this study of
the genius of Great Britain. I estimate the number of really
eminent persons included in the Dictionary—eminent
that is by virtue of a high degree of inborn ability and not
through the accident of birth—as about eight hundred. Very
few of these are women; to every hundred eminent men there are only
about four eminent women. As regards distribution throughout the
United Kingdom (eliminating individuals of mixed ancestry) it is
found that 74 per cent, are English, nearly 16 per cent. Scotch, 5
per cent. Irish, over 3 per cent. Welsh, and 2 per cent. Cornish.
As regards the social class from which they spring (so far as the
evidence allows us to determine this) we find that even when we
leave out of account the large number who are sons of peers, no
fewer than 21 per cent, still clearly belong to the small number of
people who can be said to be of "good family," and in reality the
proportion is still larger. The professional classes (often merging
into the previous higher social class) claim over 41 per cent., a
very large proportion, but here we are able to determine its full
strength; a very extraordinary fact about the contribution of the
professional classes is that, although lawyers, doctors, engineers,
military and naval officers, etc., are included under this head, no
fewer than half of the eminent persons furnished by these classes
are the children of clergymen and ministers, who have thus exerted
with marvellous effect the privilege, accorded to them at the
Reformation, of adding to the genius of the country. Only 15 per
cent, belong to the trading or commercial classes, though these
range from bankers and manufacturers to publicans, and 6 per cent,
to the farmer and yeoman class. The craftsman and artisan classes
(closely allied to the trading class, but involving a real manual
training, and including weavers, smiths, millers, saddlers, etc.)
are, however, responsible for 15 per cent. The unskilled
workers—the great mass of the population—have furnished
scarcely 2 per cent, of our eminent and ruling men. Nothing could
show more clearly than these figures the peculiarly oligarchic
basis on which English civilisation has been built up. It may be of
interest to present these rough figures; to analyse adequately all
the results which emerge from a study of the Dictionary
would require far more space than I can here dispose of. I merely
refer to them here to show how valuable and instructive this great
work becomes when intelligently used.

At the same time the value and charm of these volumes for most
readers lie on the surface; we have here a series of often
fascinatingly interesting narratives, sometimes embodying new
research, and usually accompanied by an estimate of the subject's
special achievement, on the whole written by men who are admirably
competent to form a sane judgment of their subjects. The first
editor of the Dictionary, Mr. Leslie Stephen, himself
possesses a special aptitude for such narratives—unbiased,
shrewd yet sympathetic, intent on placing a man in true relation to
his times and to the history of ideas. It is true that these
special qualities, clearly dominating the early volumes, were
accompanied by their defects. I do not propose to discuss the minor
defects of the Dictionary; there are many minute errors and
discrepancies which, it is easy to say, could have been avoided by
more careful editing, but it must be admitted—even by a
writer who is himself an editor—that even an editor is human,
and that it is human to err. I refer to a certain general
indifference to accurately precise biographical detail, a tendency
to slur over definite yet often very significant facts because they
have no obvious bearing on the more abstract interest of the
subject. In a great many cases it is thus difficult to disentangle
the family history, even when the facts are really known; too often
the antiquated custom is perpetuated of ignoring the female element
in a family. Again, we are often not told whether a man ever had
children or even whether he was married. We have a right to expect
the statement of so interesting and significant a fact; yet in not
less than 10 per cent, of the long biographies (i.e., those
extending over three pages) the point is not so much as mentioned,
and we are left in the dark as to whether the writer was himself
ignorant, whether he knew the facts so well that he forgot to
mention them, or whether he thought them too trivial to mention at
all. We are thus driven back for information on so important a
point to more original sources of information.

There is another general charge to be brought against the
national biographers. They have frequently failed to realise where
biography ends and history begins. Even if no names were appended
to the articles we should know that, in many cases, the writers
were historians masquerading in the disguise of biographers, and
not always disposed to take their parts very seriously. Over and
over again we are compelled to trudge through the same round of
historical events until we are inclined to think that the work
should really be called the Dictionary of National History. Yet
history and biography are two quite different processes and demand
quite different methods. Properly considered, great personalities
constitute only one of the elements in the complex web which it is
the historian's task to disentangle. It may be his business to find
such personalities, but, when found, their further study belongs to
the biographer, who is not concerned with the general course of
history. Certainly it is an advantage for the historian to possess
some skill and insight as regards the personal factors in history,
just as it is an advantagefor a physiologist to be acquainted with
physics. But the tasks of historian and biographer remain different
and involve different methods. In the history of the seventeenth
century, for instance, the historian comes upon Cromwell, and he
has learnt to recognise the exact weight of this personal factor in
seventeenth-century affairs. But it is not his business to
ascertain why it was Cromwell, and no other, who played this
special part in those affairs; he is not called upon to investigate
the intimate facts which made Cromwell what he was, the special
qualities of his Welsh and English ancestry, or the precise
influence on his character of the morbid mental affection from
which he suffered in early life. These intimate and private facts
the historian must largely take for granted, just as the biographer
must take for granted the general course of public affairs on which
these facts had so important a bearing. Such distinctions are
fairly elementary, but one may well doubt whether our national
biographers have always realised them; otherwise they would not so
often have deluged us with the same stream of history, to the
neglect of their own business, nor devoted so disproportionate a
space to insignificant persons around whom some eddy of history has
chanced to whirl.

So far I have spoken of the Dictionary largely as it
began and developed under the influence of Mr. Leslie Stephen. It
must not be forgotten, however, that about half of the work has
been carried out under the editorial influence of Mr. Sidney Lee.
It is evident that Mr. Lee is an editor whose mental qualities are
very unlike those of Mr. Stephen. He is not a philosophic thinker;
he is clearly not mainly preoccupied with ideas and their currents,
nor much concerned to sum up a personality in a happy formula. But,
on the other hand, he possesses certain qualities which Mr. Stephen
has never been able to acquire. His precision of statement is
admirable (though I cannot add that the latter part of the
Dictionary is peculiarly free from errors and misprints),
and he has a laudable passion for facts; both these qualities are
of the first importance in a dictionary, where one may or may not
desire to find views and opinions, but certainly desires to find
the greatest amount of reliable and significant facts in the
smallest amount of space. I would point to Mr. Lee's article on
Sterne as a masterpiece in these respects; every essential fact is
concisely stated, there is nothing superfluous, with the result
that in those few pages we have a more vivid picture, and even a
larger amount of biographical material, than may be found in lives
of Sterne occupying several volumes. There are even indications
that Mr. Lee would gladly have introduced greater method into the
Dictionary; his article on Shakespeare is unique in the work
by the adoption of marginal titles for each paragraph. Any
uniformity of method and order in the contents of the articles it
was, however, clearly impracticable to adopt at so late a
stage.

Yet this question of method is fundamental, and a lack of method
is the most serious charge which a student of biography can bring
against this Dictionary. The method, so far as it has any,
is essentially antiquated; the scientific modes of thought
developed during a century have been ignored; and the founders of
the Dictionary, for all that their methods show to the
contrary, might have been the contemporaries of Johnson.

Why drag in, it may be asked, any question of "scientific
methods "? What has science to do with biography? The answer must
be that it has everything to do with it. The very word "biography"
itself indicates that we have left the vague and romantic regions
of history to enter the circle of the biological sciences.
Biography is, or should be, at least as much of a science as
ethnography; it is a description of the life of an individual just
as ethnography is the description of the life of the race. It is a
science in which, when we approach it seriously, both anthropology
and psychology are found to have their concern; and though the data
with which the national biographers had usually to be content could
not satisfy a scientific mind, the recognition of scientific
methods would greatly have aided their work.

It may be said, and with truth, that when the Dictionary
was planned, such methods, as applied in these fields, were less
developed and less widely known than they are now beginning to be,
and that the tendency to greater precision in the later volumes
represents the only attempt that remained possible to gain
recognition for scientific methods.

It may well be; yet one may point out that every serious student
would have been immensely aided in using this Dictionary if,
at the outset, it had been planned with some regard to its
unquestionable relationship to the human biological sciences. It
can only rarely happen that the student who consults an article in
a biographical dictionary desires an undigested mass of confused
facts, through which he must painfully work his way in order to
find the one definite fact he needs. There are a very large number
of personal facts he may desire to see stated on the best available
authority, and the ideal dictionary of biography—in so far as
it deals with persons of undoubted genius or talent—would
present all such primary personal facts in so clear and methodical
a manner and in so invariable an order, that they could be
discovered at a glance. When the writer of a biographical article
is allowed to stir up all his facts into a stodgy mass, it is
difficult, even for himself, to discover what he has put in and
what he has left out, and this lack of method is an inevitable
source of perplexity and inconvenience to the readers who consult
his work. Let us take, for instance, the personal appearance of a
great man. It is of considerable significance, from various points
of view, to know the exact manner of man that an eminent personage
appeared in the flesh to his contemporaries; few things, indeed,
are more interesting to know. It is never, however, quite easy to
find any personal description in these articles, and when found it
is usually excessively brief; in 50 per cent, of the cases, as
regards the most eminent persons, it is not found at all. It may be
said that in many cases nothing is known of a great man's personal
appearance. But a remarkable point about the national biographers
is that the less is known the more carefully they often record it,
and that when much is known they often record nothing. In a
considerable proportion of the articles written by intimate
personal friends there is not a single word to indicate that the
writer had ever seen his subject in the flesh, or had any
conception as to what he was like. So extraordinary a failure would
have been rendered impossible even by the simplest attention to
method. Moreover, it is not only important to know, definitely and
reliably, the available personal facts; but to know also, with
equal definiteness, what facts are not available. The untrained
literary man cannot do this without a pang; it is never pleasant to
state mere bald negative facts. It is evident, however, as one
realises after spending much time over this Dictionary, that
in order to attain the highest possible degree of serviceable-ness,
the articles, so far at least as all persons of eminent genius are
concerned, should be largely made up of sections and paragraphs,
each with its definite heading, the order in which these follow
being invariable, decided by the editors at the outset after the
most careful consideration. Doubtless an omnivorous schoolgirl, for
whom all facts are new and equally important, may prefer this
Dictionary as it is; but for more serious students so
unmethodical a method leads, and must lead, to much weariness and
labour. Excellent as the articles generally are in their antiquated
and purely literary way, they do not enable the reader to put his
finger, at a glance, on the fact he is searching for,
and—still more unfortunately—when the fact is absent
they do not enable him to decide whether it is unknown or whether
the biographer has simply overlooked it. The dates of birth and
death are always treated in this Dictionary with methodical
and scrupulous care; when we have a work which shall treat in order
with the like scrupulous method every essential fact in an eminent
life we shall possess an ideal dictionary of national
biography.

It may seem both a thankless and an unthankful task to criticise
the methods of a series of volumes so fascinating in their
interest, a work on which so much skill and research have been
expended, the only work of the kind which most of us can ever hope
to see. In its admirable achievement, however, the
Dictionary reveals the possibility of still higher
achievement, and itself helps to inspire the ideal which will mould
the work of its successors in a future generation. In the meantime
we shall certainly return again and again to a work which is not
only one of the noblest monuments of English literary activity in
the nineteenth century but an unfailing source of instruction and
delight.

XI. THE GENIUS OF NIETZSCHE

I have on three occasions written of Nietzsche. The first was
in the SAVOY during 1896, and my essay, reprinted in the following
year in AFFIRMATIONS, was probably the first comprehensive study of
Nietzsche in English; in 1917 I wrote, by editorial invitation, the
article on Nietzsche for Hastings' ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF RELIGION AND
ETHICS. Between these two came the shortest and slightest of the
three, in the Paris WEEKLY CRITICAL REVIEW for April 30th, 1903,
here reprinted.

THE nearly simultaneous publication of an English translation of
Morgenröthe (The Dawn of Day) and a study in German by Dr.
Möbius on the pathological aspects of Nietzsche, suggests many
reflections concerning the variegated progress of Nietzsche's fame.
The young professor of philology in the University of Bale, who was
compelled by ill-health at the beginning of his career to retire on
a pension, spent nearly the whole remaining period of his active
life in wandering among the health resorts of the Tyrol and North
Italy, and in writing books, which attracted no attention, and
gradually became stranger and more extravagant as the
characteristic exaltation of general paralysis permeated his brain.
At last, in 1888, Nietzsche was "discovered;" Brandes, the most
alert and the most catholic of European critics, chanced to meet
with the now considerable series of books which had thus appeared
and recognised that a new and powerful personality had come into
literature. Almost at this moment, after a period of unusually
intense literary activity—a final flaring-up of the dying
intellect—Nietzsche's mind was extinguished. At the beginning
of January, 1889, Brandes received a brief and enigmatic note,
written in a large handwriting on lines ruled in pencil, unstamped,
wrongly addressed, and signed "The Crucified One." On the day on
which this was probably posted Nietzsche was found helpless in the
streets of Turin. From that moment he never regained complete
consciousness of himself or of his surroundings. His intelligence
had fallen to the level of a little child's, and so remained till
his death more than ten years later.

During recent years several of Nietzsche's books have been
translated into English, but with an enthusiasm which was, to say
the least, injudicious. The English publishers exclusively brought
forward the latest, the most extravagant, the most insane portions
of his work, and it is not surprising that, except among those
extravagant persons to whom extravagance naturally appeals,
Nietzsche has until lately found few English readers. Now at length
one of the sanest and most truly characteristic of his books has
appeared in a translation which, if it fails to render the strength
and beauty of the original, is at all events careful and correct,
and at last, even in England, Nietzsche is beginning to find
appreciators and admirers.

The tragic irony of Nietzsche's fate has, however, brought it
about that, at the moment when he has at last gained serious
recognition in England, Dr. Mobius, an alienist of recognised
position in Germany, has for the first time ascertained and
published all the facts in Nietzsche's life, as well as in his
work, which demonstrate his insanity and its slow and insidious
development, facts which cannot always be clearly traced in the
otherwise admirable biography which Nietzsche's sister is
publishing. Dr. Mobius, it should be said, is not one of those who
are bent on proving at all costs the universal insanity of genius;
he is a sympathetic student of genius for its own sake, and not for
the sake of enlarging the frontiers of psychiatry. Until the period
when he wrote Zarathustra, Dr. Mobius very reasonably
concludes, Nietzsche must be regarded as sane. Dr. Mobius has,
however, succeeded in showing—what could not be gathered from
the biography—that on both sides he probably inherited a
slight but definite strain of nervous disease. Every acute reader,
even of his earliest works, must indeed feel that here is a writer
too abnormally sensitive to enable one to count him with any
probability among the general mass of healthy, well-balanced
humanity. But with Zarathustra, the malady of general
paralysis that had already taken possession of him, showed its
first marked eruption. The pace at which this work was written, and
the writer's mental exaltation at the time, alone indicate the
morbid nature of the activity at work. And with this new stage of
acute mental disorder emerge all those ideas which the disciple of
Nietzsche most easily assimilates—the doctrine of the
privileged "over-man," the statement of "immoralism," the violent
assertion of the evils of sympathy, the command, "Be hard," which
is only rightly understood when we recognise it as a counsel of
perfection addressed to the teacher's own over-sensitive brain. At
the same time, as Dr. Mobius already recognises, even in
Zarathustra and the other works written during the last four
years of his intellectual activity, it can by no means be said that
the genius has departed. On the contrary, it is in many respects
heightened. Excessive, fantastic, perverse, obscure, this later
work often is, but in force and splendour of diction, in
imaginative vision, in what he might himself have termed halcyonic
wit, it often surpasses his earlier, more sane, and balanced work.
It is not strange that in the face of so irritating a mystery the
critical mind has often been torn in two, on the one hand taken
captive by the accomplished artist in psychological analysis, on
the other hand, relentlessly stiffening itself against the
acceptance of sheer insanity.

The doctrine of the insanity of genius, notwithstanding many
thorough-going champions, may be said to be finally discredited. It
suffices to select any hundred men of genius at random to find that
while certainly one or another has been insane, that is also the
case among the general population taken at random. Still the
proportion remains extremely small. Moreover, when we investigate
the individuals who make up the small proportion we find that the
manifestations of their genius are not even parallel with the
manifestations of their insanity; when they displayed most genius
they were sane. The exceptions are extremely few, far fewer than is
commonly supposed. They do, however, occur. In Christopher Smart,
the poet, whose one masterpiece was written in an asylum, we see
quite clearly how the ferment of mania, on this occasion, mingled
happily with his small genius and raised it to a height of vague
imaginative splendour—however perilously close to the abyss
of incoherence—which, without that ferment, he never
attained, and never could attain. In Rousseau, again, we see how
beneficially insanity may stimulate genius. During all his life
Rousseau was mentally morbid, during his later years he was
unquestionably insane, the victim of delusions of persecution. The
insane belief that he lived in the midst of enemies who were
perpetually plotting his ruin, wrought his tortured brain to that
pitch of heroic self-defence which alone could enable him to write
the intricate self-revelation of the Confessions. In recent
times there has probably been no more remarkable instance of the
same combination than we see in Nietzsche. His insanity distorted
the equipoise of his fine and subtle intellect, but at the same
time he owed to the torturing sting of that malady a poignant
sensibility, a penetrating impulse to reach the core of things, and
an imaginative atmosphere, which, without it, he could never have
reached. In Nietzsche are thus realised many of the traditional
sayings concerning genius, which are usually so far astray. Here
the madness of genius is a real and definite fact; here there is
indeed a consuming flame which flares up fatally and irresistibly
until one of the finest brains of the century was reduced to little
better than a heap of ashes in the healthy body of a child.

When we understand the rare combination that took place in
Nietzsche, we may see our way to a sound critical estimate of his
work, and at the same time realise why it is that such an estimate
has been so difficult to reach. To accept him as a great teacher of
morals, to reject him as the victim of insanity, have been fairly
obvious alternatives which alike reveal a lack of critical
discernment. We see a man who was in touch with the finest culture
of his time at nearly every point—it cannot be said at quite
every point, for the plastic arts never existed for
Nietzsche—and who seeks to probe to the bottom the most
essential questions of life. Slowly the acuteness of that search is
intensified by the development of a disease which has its seat in
the searching intellect itself. More The Genius of Nietzsche and
more the man becomes absorbed in an intellectual struggle with his
malady, and the thoughts and images he fashions become, more and
more, merely the weapons of his personal warfare. For this reason
they cannot be of much use to the average citizen, but the
spectacle of that heroic struggle, and even much that resulted from
it up till the last, still remains helpful and stimulating. The
progress of the struggle is recorded, mostly as pensées
strung together at random, in Nietzsche's works. These
pensées are not of equal value, they are frequently
conflicting, sometimes obscure, even outrageous. There are many
pearls here, as Dr. Möbius truly remarks, but they are not all
pearls. It may be added that as we gaze at them we realise how the
most beautiful things in the world may sometimes grow around a
point of disease.

XII. A DUTCH TOLSTOY

This essay on Frederick van Eeden was published in the WEEKLY
CRITICAL REVIEW of May 28th, 1903. Since it was written, Van Eeden
has pursued his physical and spiritual Odyssey in the Old World and
the New, through various phases, the last of which known to the
world led him into the Catholic Church.

TWELVE years ago, when Kennan's book on Siberia was attracting
wide attention, a young Dutchman appeared before the public of
Europe as the writer of an open letter to the Czar of Russia on the
treatment of political prisoners. It was a somewhat insulting
letter written with a certain ironic eloquence; as the writer
himself acknowledged, he was made of that sonorous kind of metal
which cannot help vibrating, like a bell, under the stress of
outside impulses, however futile the sound given forth may be. The
writer of this letter was a young doctor and literary man, called
Frederick van Eeden. Although little over thirty years of age, Dr.
van Eeden had attained a wide reputation—in his own specialty
one may even say throughout Europe—as an authority on the
curative applications of hypnotism, which he had studied in their
headquarters at Paris and Nancy and was actively applying at
Amsterdam in association with Dr. van Renthergem. In his own
country he was chiefly known as the author of three or four
comedies which had been successful on the stage, and as one of the
founders of De Nieuwe Gids. For this review—still
existing though he is no longer connected with its
direction—Van Eeden wrote a number of essays which show a
very wide interest in European literature, and are now collected in
three volumes of Studies. He has also published several
volumes of poems. The first of Van Eeden's books which can,
however, be said to possess any real significance as the revelation
of a new personality is Little Johannes, which appeared in
1885. There is a certain superficial fairy-tale element in this
book, and for the English translation it seemed on this account
proper to invite Mr. Andrew Lang to write an introduction. The
introduction was written, but Mr. Lang wisely confined himself to
the topic of fairy tales in general and said not a word regarding
the book to which his essay was prefixed. Little Johannes is
anything but a fairy tale. It is true that it begins with a
wonderfully sympathetic account of the life and surroundings of a
child who wanders into Elfin-land, and this machinery of the story
is more or less maintained to the end. But very soon we realise
that the device has been adopted merely in order to show human life
at a new and belittling angle; we are presented with successive
visions of the most vital problems of the human world, concerning
which the author shows himself as a sceptic refusing to accept the
most sacred words current among men and briefly sketching a kind of
pantheistic philosophy of his own.

A few years later appeared the book by which Van Eeden has so
far attained his chief reputation in Holland, Johannes
Viator. It is the most complete expression he has reached of
his vision of the world, of his gospel of life. This book, however,
will shortly appear in an English translation, and it would be out
of place to attempt to anticipate the judgment which the English
reader may pronounce upon it. Another and still more recent book,
Van de Koele Meren des Doods—now widely known to
English and American readers as The Deeps of
Deliverance—must not be passed over, for it is in this
novel that we may best observe Van Eeden's methods as an
artist.

It is the story of the whole life of a young girl of somewhat
morbid temperament, born with a refined but rather sensuous nature,
who by her very innocence and ignorance is led into a marriage
which is no marriage, and so, by equally natural and imperceptible
steps, falls into the hands of a lover, and ultimately, under the
degrading influence of morphia, to still lower moral depths,
finally recovering her balance, and leading the few remaining years
of her life in peaceful retirement among the poor country folk of
her native place.

In sympathetic insight, in delicate perception of character,
this picture of a sensitive, loving, degraded, fine-souled
woman—a more common type than we are perhaps always willing
to admit—could scarcely be surpassed. It suffices to place
Van Eeden in all but the first rank of contemporary novelists. One
cannot fail to see that the seven years of therapeutical hypnotism
in the Amsterdam clinique have not been without advantage for the
novelist; it is such women as Hedwig that the doctor whose
specialty is nervous disease most easily learns to understand and
to feel pity for. It may indeed be gathered from a remark made in
the course of the novel that the author founded his story on a real
case. But all the clinical documents in the world will be of no
artistic use to the doctor who is not an artist.

As a novelist, Van Eeden may be said to represent that modern
reaction against naturalism which is yet willing to profit by the
lesson that naturalism has taught. The methods of Zola belong to
the past, but they have at least served to make it possible for all
who come after to give easy and simple expression to the most
veracious presentation of life. The methods of naturalism sought to
lay bare to the coldest vision the minutest details of life, not
indeed as such methods were practised by Zola—for Zola was
too much devoted at heart to the romanticism he struggled against,
ever to be able to lay bare anything—but at all events in the
hands of the greater artists with whom he was more or less
associated. Those hard and minute details no longer seem to us very
precious. But we never cease to be drawn towards a truly intimate
vision of life. In such a book as this of Van Eeden's we see how
the expression of crude, precise, physical details may fall away as
without significance, while yet the novelist sets forth every vital
fact that seems to him truly significant, with a quiet simplicity
and courage that is never really offensive, though it must take
away the breath of our average English novelists who know how to be
impossibly romantic, and know indeed also how to be offensive, but
cannot be simple and veracious in face of the deepest facts of
life. It may even be said that so great a master as Tolstoy is at
this point at some disadvantage; he grasps firmly the great
spiritual facts; he throws in at times crude touches of physical
realism; the modern direct naturalistic vision of life he is too
old to acquire.

A man of Van Eeden's temperament is, however, hardly content
with an artistic medium of expression, however veracious. We learn
this easily from the strong element of mysticism that emerges in
the course of Hedwig's history, objectively as it is introduced.
Like Tolstoy he has written little pamphlets on the meaning of
existence; like Tolstoy, also, he believes in a more or less
communistic life, and in 1899 founded a community on this basis at
Bussun, called, after Thoreau's book, Walden. He believes in the
collective possession of the land, and has founded a society, now
numbering some three thousand persons, for the realisation of this
project; while he has lately started a weekly paper for the
furtherance of the same object, and is at present engaged on a book
which will set forth his views on social questions.

It may seem an injustice to this modest and comparatively young
Dutchman to compare him with the great Russian whose pen is so far
mightier and more skilful than his own, the most famous of living
authors. It is unjust not merely because Van Eeden is still young,
but also because he is by no means a disciple of Tolstoy; as an
artist he represents more modern methods, while as a social
reformer his views are not marked by the impossible extravagance of
Tolstoy's. He is, moreover, distinctly and essentially a Dutchman,
with that special mixture of realism and idealism, of humanity and
mysticism, which marks the traditions of his race. But, both alike,
they are at once artists and teachers and both as artists and
teachers they have something to say. The combination is not perhaps
altogether happy; it may certainly be of use to a teacher to be an
artist; it is less certainly of use to an artist to be a teacher.
But however that may be, the combination is in its finest
manifestations sufficiently rare. Van Eeden is one of the few
living writers who is still worth listening to, whatever we may
think of his art or of his message.

XIII. BROWNING'S PLACE IN
LITERATURE

This essay on Browning appeared in the WEEKLY CRITICAL REVIEW
for August 21th, 1903.

TO the philosophic spectator of literary criticism—if such
there be—the spectacle presented by Browning's critics must
be puzzling. They are all clearly anxious, even eager, to admire
Browning, they are all certain that there is something to admire;
but as to what that something is, the most various opinions
prevail. If one attempts to sum up the estimates of critics it
would, on the whole, appear that Browning is an artist and poet of
the very first order, who has discovered new forms of poetic art
and opened up new horizons of poetic energy; that he is, in
addition, a writer who merits our admiration on account of his
extraordinary erudition and scholarship; that, moreover, we have to
recognise in him a psychologist of the highest order; that,
further, he was a philosophic, or, at all events, theological
moralist, with a new message to humanity; that he was, finally, one
of the supreme amateurs of the world, in the higher sense of that
much-abused word.

Everyone who is anxious, and even eager, to admire Browning and
to place him justly—as indeed we all are—cannot fail to
find here an amply satisfying conception. A man who combined the
varying qualities of a Shakespeare, a Herbert Spencer, a St. Paul,
and a Leonardo must certainly be regarded as a unique personality.
Yet even on this calm acclivity to which the critics of Browning
have so skilfully conducted us, it is inevitable that, however
sympathetic we may remain, certain reflections should arise. It may
not be altogether useless to give expression to these reflections
in order.

For the moment, indeed, we may put aside the first point, in
regarding Browning as poet and artist. We may assume, as a working
hypothesis, that he was, even essentially, a poet and artist, while
for the present not attempting to determine the precise quality or
degree of his poetic art.

First, then, there is that erudition and scholarship to which
the critic of Browning never fails to direct our admiring
attention. It can scarcely be claimed that erudition is more than a
subsidiary aid to the psychologist, the moralist, or even the
amateur, and, indeed, it is in connection with Browning as poet
that this vision of immense learning is evoked. Here, it must first
be pointed out that, in reality, every poet—every poet, that
is, who goes beyond the simple swallow-flights of personal lyric
song—is learned. Learning is a necessary part of a poet's
stock-in-trade, of his raw material. Homer, when we rightly
understand his relation to his time, appears as a very learned
poet; Shakespeare was appallingly learned. Keats was learned. The
truly notable point about the learning of Browning is not its
existence, nor even its extent, still less its accuracy—he
was in no proper sense a scholar, and never professed to
be—but the fact that it was united with an extremely
retentive memory. Homer and Shakespeare and Keats do not impress us
by their learning; to repeat a famous simile, in their learning
they were like workers in the diamond mines of Golconda: they only
sought for jewels; Browning's absorbant memory was like a sponge
that sucked up diamonds and mud alike, and with the native energy
of his temperament, he squeezed them out alike. His learning was
thus more conspicuous; we need not too hastily conclude that it was
greater or more admirable.

The point may be easily yielded; but Browning's position as a
great psychologist remains unaffected by any considerations as to
the precise quantity and quality of his learning. It is claimed
that Browning's special distinction is the invention of the
dramatic lyric, and the distinctive character of this literary
species lies in its psychological insight, its casuistical skill,
its ability to present in all ramifications the mental attitude of
a person quite other than the dramatic lyrist himself. "Bishop
Blougrom's Apology" is commonly regarded as one of the most
accomplished examples of this species. It so happens that we can go
behind Bishop Blougrom; Browning stated definitely that in Blougrom
he had in mind Cardinal Wiseman, and that, moreover, he was not
moved by any hostile motive; he was really writing an "apology" for
Cardinal Wiseman.

In the absence of any intimate personal knowledge of
Wiseman—an absence of knowledge which it is fairly certain
that Browning shared—we must fall back on the biography of
Wiseman, which presents us with a completely intelligible and, so
far as can be judged, veracious portrait of a man whose sincerity
was beyond question, and who bears scarcely any resemblance to
Blougrom. Browning's psychological defence of Wiseman has,
therefore, no real relation to the man he is defending; it is even
without that kind of value which belongs to a felicitious
caricature. As a psychological analysis it breaks down altogether;
its value must be estimated on an artistic basis. It is not
difficult to see why the claim of Browning the psychologist cannot
be maintained. As Mr. Chesterton, the latest and one of the most
discriminating of his critics, quite truly observes, Browning was
not an "intellectual." He had not that sensitive, supple, receptive
temperament—such as Renan possessed in so high a
degree—which enables a man to put aside for the time his own
convictions and his own point of view, to shift his standpoint, to
enter imaginatively into another man's skin. Browning's defective
psychological insight is reflected in his defective critical
insight. The attraction he felt for insignificant personalities in
art has always been noted, but it is usual to slur over the fact
that, in many cases certainly, Browning himself by no means
regarded them as insignificant. His critical estimates were, even
in his own day, already passing out of date. In two of the happiest
and most effective of his poems it is easy to read between the
lines that he regarded Andrea del Sarto as a painter who narrowly
escaped reaching the highest summits of art, and Fra Lippo Lippi as
the painter of mere feminine prettiness. Browning's dramatic lyric
is really a distorted personal lyric, and the distinction involves
an important difference. We are not really being led into the
intimate recesses of another man's soul, we are simply being told
how one Robert Browning—a sturdy, conventional English
gentleman, endowed with an extraordinarily vigorous mind, and very
pronounced views on morality and religion—would feel if by
some mysterious fate he had himself become a scamp, a coward, or a
humbug. Browning evidently delighted in inventing difficult
exercises of this kind, and was justified, for they constituted a
gymnastics peculiarly suited to his athletic mind. But they have no
very close connection with psychology and not much with
casuistry.

The critic of Browning becomes indifferent alike to his
erudition and his psychology when he turns to Browning the moralist
and theologian. The profound sincerity of Browning's moral and
theological convictions cannot be questioned. They were all the
more fundamental, and not the less genuine, because they were
temperamental. Indeed, one may almost say they were inherited.
Little as Browning had in common with his father, the
thorough-going eighteenth-century optimism which his father had
imbibed from Pope, and the nineteenth-century Liberal Nonconformity
which he had added to it, were accepted intact by his son, whose
native energy of character merely made the optimism more
aggressive—so aggressive, indeed, that it sometimes almost
persuades us of the beauty of pessimism—and the Liberal
Nonconformity more comprehensive, as his restless mental fertility
played around them. But in essentials they never moved very far
from the starting point. "Merely man, and nothing more"—but
for Browning a "man" was a sturdy, conventional, British, Liberal
Nonconformist, middle-class gentleman. Thus Browning represented
admirably one aspect of the religious thought of his time, just as
Tennyson, with his more gracious, but perhaps less radical, Broad
Church Anglicanism, represented another. But let us turn to one of
the great masters—to Shakespeare. Here also we find, as well
as a great poet, a moralist grappling with the problems of life and
of death. But we always find Shakespeare above or below the plane
on which the definitely circumscribed groups of believers are
fixed. It is a curious fact, all the more notable since it is
clearly not due to any trimming caution, that Shakespeare never
offends the most sensitive free-thinker, the most devout Catholic.
It can scarcely be said of Browning. Whether we are able to enter
the little chapel at Camberwell, or whether we only listen outside,
we cannot fail to feel the stimulating magnetism of this strident
preacher's voice, with its unfailing theological optimism. But it
is not thus that we approach Goethe or Shakespeare.

But, after all, what have scholarship, psychology, theology, to
do with literature? It is with Browning the poet and artist that
the critic is finally and centrally concerned. That Browning
possessed the fundamental temperament of the poet, and that he
strenuously strove to be an artist, may fairly be taken as facts
that are beyond argument. It is when an attempt is made to define
his precise position and to estimate its significance that the
difficulty comes in. Mr. Chesterton has truly said that the general
characteristic of Browning's form at its point of greatest
originality is its dexterous use of the grotesque, more especially
as used to express sublime emotion, and that the underlying source
and meaning of this grotesqueness is energy. In other words,
Browning is the poet of energy artistically expressing itself in
the grotesque. This seems admirable. Then Mr. Chesterton goes on
bravely to argue that grotesque energy is a form of art which has
been reached at the highest moments of human inspiration. But here
we pause, and, once again, we begin to reflect. Certainly, energy
is very fundamental in Browning; it was ingrained in the nervous
texture of the man, in his loud voice, his emphatic gestures: "I
was ever a fighter." And the man is reflected in his work. He
cannot easily talk without shouting, or walk without running; if
the humour should take him to dance it could surely be nothing less
athletic than a bolero. He presents in a supreme degree the quality
which Coleridge termed Nimiety, the quality of Too-muchness,
and certainly a man of this temperament is naturally attracted to
the grotesque. The man of exuberant energy craves to come in touch
with the material aspect of things; he wants to handle strange,
rough, unfamiliar shapes. The grotesque, one may point out, always
gives the impression of unconquered material, of matter not yet
subdued by spirit, it must always be unfamiliar. This last
characteristic was clearly realised by Browning himself, and he
describes those strange and quaintly-shaped sea creatures "which
only the fisher looks grave at." To the man who truly knows them
they are not grotesque. Many persons can probably remember when as
children they first heard a violin; the player may have been a
master; but the impression produced by the unfamiliar sound of the
instrument was exquisitely grotesque.

When we really understand a grotesque thing, when it has become
luminous to intelligence, it is no more grotesque than is any
ordinary "two-legged bird without feathers" to his fellow men. It
will be seen that we have struck on the reason why it is that to
exalt unduly the poetry of the grotesque reveals a certain mental
confusion, a certain defect of critical insight. The searching
inquisitive artist is interested in the grotesque; Leonardo, as his
note-books show, was eagerly interested in the grotesque, but there
is nothing grotesque in the art of Leonardo; he treated the
grotesque as crude material of art, and in passing through his
searching brain it ceased to be grotesque. The poet of energy,
however, delights in exercising his energy in the manipulation of
the crude material of art; he loves to pile up the raw strange
chunks, with all the sharp points sticking out, into fantastic
edifices. He strives to embody the maximum amount of natural
material in his art. No doubt there was a real organic reason why
Browning adopted this method: it was the method that suited him
best. Mr. Chesterton observes that Browning was a poet who
stuttered. There is real insight in this remark. A person who
stutters is expending an immense amount of articulatory energy, but
he has forgotten the less obvious but equally essential necessity
for harmonious breathing. His failure is strictly analogous to that
of the young violinist who puts so much energy into his bow-hand
that he forgets his string-hand. Browning's poetry is a stutter, an
idealised stutter, in its perpetual emphasis, its strenuous
combative energy, possessing so Titanic a quality as to induce even
the critic who has acutely pointed out this characteristic to place
Browning in the front rank of the world's poets and artists.

Yet let us turn to the great artists, whose mastery is
universally acknowledged; whatever the form of their art may have
been the grotesque has fallen away to an altogether subordinate
place; there are no heavy chunks of unworked material, no sharp
points sticking out; even energy is no more visible, being absorbed
in securing the perfect adjustment of each part to the whole;
string-hand and bow-hand are working together in absolute harmony.
"I was ever a fighter"—that saying was never heard from the
lips of any supreme artist. Look at some fragment of sculpture by a
Greek, or by Rodin, and it seems as light as foam and almost as
translucent; listen to some piece of music by Mozart, its felicity
is divine, but there is nothing in it; stand in the room that holds
the Meninas of Velasquez, and you seem to see a vision that has
come miraculously, effortlessly, which in another moment may cease
to be. Or take the art we are here immediately concerned with, and
on whatever scale of magnitude you please: Shakespeare or Verlaine;
we no longer hear the strenuous, insistent voice of the stutterer,
we seem only conscious of a breath, on which the meaning aerially
floats. It is idle to argue that Hudibras may be placed
beside the Canterbury Tales, and the Alchemist beside
Lear. Browning belongs to the same circle in the Paradise of
Art as Butler and Ben Jonson; as an artist his ambitions were
greater than Butler's, his achievements scarcely less; as a
personality and a poet he is not unworthy to be named with Ben
Jonson. We do him an injustice by comparing him to Chaucer or
Shakespeare; with the divine masters he can never be, but his place
in our literature remains a noble and assured place.

XIV. FICTION IN THE AUSTRALIAN
BUSH

This article was published in the WEEKLY CRITICAL REVIEW for
September 17th, 1903. Since then the notable name of Henry Handel
Richardson is to be added to the foremost writers of Australian
fiction.

THE prevailing aspect of the Australian bush is commonly said to
be of monotony and melancholy. That is the aspect emphasised by
Marcus Clarke in an impressive passage which has often been quoted,
and not seldom imitated. In the interesting Preface to a collection
of short Australian stories reprinted from the Sydney
Bulletin, the most natively characteristic of Australian
journals, Mr. A. G. Stephens protests, not without reason, against
the prevalence of this belief in the melancholy of the bush; it is,
he says, a misconception fostered by Englishmen; yet in the typical
Australian stories to which his remarks are prefixed, there are few
descriptions of the bush which fail to confirm the impression Mr.
Stephens states to be false. It is not difficult to see why those
who attempt to describe the bush usually fall back so easily on the
epithets "weird" and "melancholy." A land in which the predominant
tree, the eucalyptus, has the fantastic habit of shedding its bark
in great sheets, and where man has rendered these trees over vast
areas still more uncanny by ring-barking them to death, a land in
which the cries of birds and other living things are for the most
part shrill or mournful, and where the appearance of the animals as
well as of the trees is peculiar and primitive to an extent unknown
elsewhere, is a land that may well seem hideous and melancholy to
those who arrive in it as exiles from home, or even to its own
children in the impatient eagerness of youth. And yet the
Australian bush is full of exquisite beauty. One who comes to it,
not as an unwilling exile, but content to live for six months at a
time without approaching within twenty miles of the little
townships which are themselves only about the size of small English
villages learns to see its gracious beauty better than its sadness.
The gently undulating hills bathed in eternal sunshine and peace,
the exhilarating air, the loveliness of spring when the
wattle—the Australian acacia—flings its trailing golden
blossoms over the land, the strange exotic products of this
primitive continent, all these things have a life-long charm for
one to whom they have once revealed their beauty.

Just as the Australian novelist delights to describe the
melancholy aspects of the scenery of his native land, so also he
insists on the melancholy aspects of the life of its inhabitants.
Of all themes none seems to attract him so much as the lugubrious
deaths of lost wanderers in the parched deserts of the interior.
His appetite for tragedy, for robbery, rape, murder, almost equals
that of the early Elizabethan dramatists. It is a crude and
youthful taste, doubtless, but the love of strong sensation which
frequently marks the beginnings of art is not necessarily morbid
and may only be a sign of young and vigorous life. Even when he is
dealing with those inhabitants of the land, the bushmen, drovers,
shepherds and so forth—whose occupations are necessarily
peaceful and who can seldom be brought into contact with
tragedy—the Australian story-teller delights to dwell on
their uncouth roughness, and revels in the effort to suggest to the
reader the unspeakable character of their language. For one who
knows the true average Australian of the bush, the sons of the
settlers who went out to the land in the great immigration
movements of the middle of the nineteenth century, it requires an
effort to pass from the Australian bush-inhabitants of fiction to
those of real life. When I recall the quiet Australian farmer who,
as he once acknowledged to me in a sudden moment of expansion,
would often at sunrise ascend the hill, near which he was born and
around which his own children were growing up, to become lost for
an hour at a time in the beauty around him, and when I think of the
innumerable traits of humanity and refinement one meets with
throughout the bush, I realise that the semi-imbecile swagsman and
the drunken swearing drover are not the most important products of
Australia, and may even be ignored altogether.

Among the younger writers of Australian fiction,—leaving
out of account those who have more or less severed themselves from
Australia and chosen to write mainly for an English
public—Lawson has attracted attention, and deservedly, for
while he makes no claim to distinction and his ideals of artistic
perfection are humble, he is yet an accom-, plished writer who
knows how to present the real condition of bush life in a
sympathetic and human fashion. The special charm of Lawson's work
lies in its unambitious simplicity and veracity. Dorrington, a
young writer of English birth who is, however, exclusively
connected with Australia, has published a volume of short stories,
Castro's Last Sacrament, which makes a higher challenge.
Dorrington is a conscious artist and knows that a writer can be
great and tragic within small space. A competent critic has stated
that his book contains the most brilliant stories that have yet
been produced in Australia. Brilliant they certainly are, and they
would be finer still if in his effort to attain tragic intensity
Dorrington had not often fallen into mere violence. In every kind
of art, violence is the mark of weakness rather than of strength;
it is the strained effort of the man who wants to be stronger than
he can be; strength, indeed, the violent man may have but he is
living on his capital, and always near the end of it. The
consciousness of this strain frequently spoils the reader's
enjoyment in Dorrington's certainly remarkable stories.

There is another form of fiction that we may reasonably expect
from a new country: the novel of the young and ambitious woman who
dreams of the large world beyond the loneliness and pettiness of
her own narrow life. A novel of this kind, My Brilliant
Career, was produced a year or two ago by a young writer who
calls herself "Miles Franklin." It is a vivid and sincere book,
certainly the true reflection of a passionate young nature,
impatient of the inevitable limitations of the life around her.
Such a book has its psychological interest, the interest that
belongs to the confessions of a Marie Baschkirtseff of the bush;
but something more than emotion is needed to make fine literature;
and here we miss any genuine instinct of art or any mature power of
thought, and are left at the end only with a painful sense of
crudity. Miles Franklin is ardently devoted to Australia, but to a
remote ideal Australia, and in the eagerness of her own embittered
and egoistic mood she tramples under foot the things that really
make Australia. One feels that My Brilliant Career was
inspired by the same impulse as another youthful book written from
the recesses of another continent, Olive Schreiner's Story of an
African Farm, but in intellectual force and artistic perception
the two writers cannot be compared.

In a little volume of short stories that has been published
recently, the Bush Studies of Barbara Baynton, we seem to
find a writer who, though with something of the artistic crudity of
Miles Franklin, yet reveals a genuine native force, a more than
merely emotional or temperamental energy, that one is less sure of
in the other young Australian writers of fiction. The distinction
of Barbara Baynton's work is not simply that it is
objective—a characteristic indicated by the title of the
book—but that it reveals an intensity of vision which is of
the real stuff of art and more than redeems the writer's sins in
the minor matters of literary style. In Barbara Baynton, as in
Miles Franklin, there is the same unsympathetic attitude towards
the life of the bush, the same haughty and bitter impatience with
the stupidities and platitudes of a commonplace environment. But
Barbara Baynton has, notwithstanding, the essential artist's eye
for the picturesque aspects of this environment. When the plain
young woman with the muddy complexion in "Billy Skywonkie," one of
the best of these stories, begins her long and miserable journey to
the lonely bush station where she has accepted the post of, as she
believes, housekeeper to the boss, and the train drags its way
through the hot shelterless barren land, "She closed her eyes from
the monotony of the dead plain. Suddenly the engine cleared its
throat in shrill welcome to two iron tanks, hoisted twenty feet and
blazing like evil eyes from a vanished face. Beside them it
squatted on its hunkers, placed a blackened thumb on its pipe and
hissed through its closed teeth like a snared wild cat, while
gulping yards of water." And in "Scrammy 'And," doubtless the most
powerful of these studies—which tells with the minute
concentrated energy of this writer how an old shepherd who had been
left alone in his hut with his dog is murdered for his
money—we perpetually find the same vivid, if sometimes rather
confused, vision of the life of the bush. The murderer seeks to
unpen the sheep in order to distract the dog from the defence of
his master; "but the hurdles of the yard faced the hut and the way
those thousand eyes reflected the rising moon was disconcerting.
The whole of the night seemed pregnant with eyes." A writer who
visualises so intensely, almost instinctively, the scenes she
paints, certainly has the makings of a fine artist.

It is always interesting to study the literature of a young
race, the offshoot of an old race living under the influences of an
absolutely new environment. The interest of such work is often out
of all relation to its absolute literary quality, because every
time, whether in Spanish South America or English Australia, we see
the outcome of a new combination of influences and ideals, a
combination which has never exactly come about before. Even the
fact that in every such young literature we can always trace the
influences of ancient Europe, even something of the corruptions and
refinements of the most civilised modernity, by no means destroys
the interest, but even adds to it. We recall the figures of those
Goths whom Sidonius tells us of, the greasy, good-natured giants
who lolled on the silken cushions of Gaulish and Roman palaces,
filled with the intoxicating wines of Italy. In a land like
Australia where a predominantly northern and British race, brought
into closer contact with the sunshine, has become accustomed to
find the extremes of luxury and hardship almost side by side, and
is more naturally apt than in the home of its fathers to worship
the ideals of physical culture, a young nation runs the risk of
becoming rotten before it is ripe. That is a risk which the
Australians may happily escape, as for the most part their ancient
Gothic relations escaped it, and the beginnings of their national
literature will one day, we may be sure, be a subject of reverent
study.

XV. BOVARYISM

This sketch of the earlier stage of the philosophy of Jules
de Gaultier appeared in the WEEKLY CRITICAL REVIEW for October 1st,
1903. I have presented some later stages in THE DANCE OF LIFE.

TO the philosophic critic of literature Flaubert is irresistibly
attractive. His genius is at once so profound and so impersonal, so
deliberately disinterested in the face of all the ideas and
emotions which commonly move mankind, that the thoughtful explorer
is impelled to let his plummet down into these limpid depths to see
if he cannot find bottom and map out a philosophic chart. This
happened to M. Jules de Gaultier at what appears to have been the
outset of his career, and twelve years ago he published a notable
pamphlet entitled Le Bovarysme. In every man, whether in fiction or
in real life, there are, as this critic assumed, two main aspects,
one physiological, the other psychological. In the first aspect a
man is born with a nature, fixed by heredity, which has imparted to
him certain aptitudes, and deprived him of other aptitudes. In the
other aspect he has been brought into an environment, he has been
submitted to an education, he has acquired ideas, which may
possibly have no relation whatever to the natural impulses and
aptitudes he possesses by heredity. Hence the possibility of
conflict between the more or less artificial psychological man and
the hereditary physiological man. And hence the ability we all
possess to conceive ourselves other than we are. All the
comedy of the world, and its tragedy, rest on this ability. The
power of conceiving ourselves other than we are, M. Jules de
Gaultier found illustrated in all Flaubert's chief characters, and
after the heroine in whom it is most tragically represented he
called it, perhaps not very happily, "le Bovarysme."

But after the publication of this pamphlet its author became
acquainted with the works of Nietzsche, just then beginning to
become known in France. He at once perceived that Nietzsche's later
doctrines, more especially in Beyond Good and Evil, had a
very distinct bearing on that conception of Bovaryism which he had
founded on Flaubert's novels and that, indeed, they enlarged it so
greatly as to transform it altogether. As it originally stood,
Bovaryism indicated that an unhappy fiction had placed man in
opposition to the tendencies of his own real nature and rendered
him comic or tragic accordingly; he suffered for accepting a
fiction rather than the truth of his own nature. But Nietzsche had
applied his relentlessly dissolving analysis to this very question
of "truth" and "fiction" in life, and he had shown that we are
justified in regarding life as more final and ultimate than even
truth, which is its servant and not its master; and that fiction
may be truth in so far as it truly serves life. In a subtle and
thoughtful philosophic study, De Kant à Nietzsche, M. de
Gaultier discussed this question of the nature of truth and
fiction, in reference to life and morals, arguing against the
sterilising influence of Kant's later attitude, and emphasising the
fruit-fulness of Nietzsche's conception.

Having realised the narrow and imperfect character of his early
view of Bovaryism, and the immensely increased range and
significance which it possessed when fertilised by Nietzschian
ideas, M. de Gaultier's next task was to re-write and enlarge his
early study of Le Bovarysme, which accordingly reappeared
last year among the publications of the Mercure de France.
Here Bovaryism, no longer regarded as simply the method whereby a
great artist showed the course of human failure in life, assumed
its full development as the universal process by which men not only
fall but also rise, by fashioning themselves to the model of their
conceptions, the process indeed by which whole communities and
civilisations evolve the conceptions which are life-giving, and
when they no longer subserve life replace them by others. Bovaryism
thus became an original view of the whole process of evolution.

Now M. de Gaultier has published another book, La Fiction
Universelle, in which the same conception is pushed still
further and admirably exemplified. No radically new modification
has been introduced—though the author has availed himself of
some of the ideas and illustrations in M. Remy de Gourmont's
remarkable book, La Culture des Idées—but on the whole
it may be said to present M. de Gaultier's conception in its most
attractive as well as its most developed form. Unlike the earlier
books, it is not mainly made up of philosophical or psychological
analysis. The author now uses his conception as a method of applied
critical study, and he presents a good example of his method in the
study of the Gon-courts regarded as symbols of the Bovaryism of
culture. The limitations of the art of the Gon-courts, and the
achievement possible within these limitations, could not be more
clearly set forth. The author represents the Goncourts as becoming
artists not, as has sometimes been the case, from exuberance of
life, but from defective vitality, from inaptitude for life, and
turning to art as to religion, with the ascetic renunciation of
intellectual saints. The poverty of their initial gift, apparently
most marked in Edmond, was in large measure compensated by the
religious ardour with which the idea of art moved them; heroic
Bovaryism here found its justification, and the Goncourts moulded
themselves into the artists they were not made, though only at the
cost of perpetual suffering. They were indeed aided by two
secrets—the emotion produced by their own experiences as men
of letters, and the discovery of the pathological element as an
influence in life—but on the whole the sense of life was
never revealed to them, their Bovaryism could never attain the
specific characters of humanity. They remained strictly spectators
of the world, passing through life as travellers in a strange
country, for whom every smallest detail is new and noteworthy. Even
the siege of Paris seemed to them nothing but matter for art, just
as, M. de Gaultier observes, some skilful craftsmen of Islam, when
enrolled for the holy war, might see nothing in the slashed flesh
of the dying but suggestions for the arabesque of a carpet.

In a study of Ibsen, entitled Dramatic
Transubstantiation, the author makes an altogether different
application of his method. In all arts, he remarks, the artist's
world is separated from the real world by the fact of
transubstantiation. That is to say, that whether the artist is
using words, pigments, marble, sounds, the material of his medium
is not the material of that which he embodies; he always represents
one substance, whether spiritual or material, through the medium of
another substance. But in theatrical representation the material
which the dramatist places on the stage is the very material of the
real world which he is embodying; he is like a landscape painter
compelled to use twigs and leaves instead of pigments; the
substance remains the same. Here is the problem of the great
dramatist, and M. de Gaultier considers that at no point has Ibsen
shown himself so supreme a master of his art as in his solution of
this problem, a problem, he points out, which is by no means solved
by putting a thesis into a play after the manner of the younger
Dumas. "I do not know what he is thinking of," says one of Ibsen's
characters, "but he seems to be thinking of something different
from what he is saying." This is what we see throughout all Ibsen's
plays. On a higher plane, above the actual intrigue which is
brought before our eyes, Ibsen represents the play of forces which
are of vastly greater significance than the mere creatures of flesh
and blood on the boards below. It is thus that he attains the
transubstantiation of great art. M. de Gaultier seeks to interpret
some of the symbolism he finds in Ibsen's plays. This symbolism, as
we know, is vague, and M. de Gaultier is far too subtle a thinker
to fall into the credulous mistake of supposing that he is
rendering Ibsen's exact thought. But he realises that in every
consummate artist's work there are threads that go out into an
infinite that is beyond even the artist himself, threads which we
may follow up in accordance with the measure of our insight, and
the skill of our intellectual grip.

M. de Gaultier applies his philosophic method of criticism in a
quite different and still more interesting way in a subsequent
study of the poet Jean Lahor and the modern Buddhist renaissance.
Again he shows how the fictions of Bovaryism may work out for good.
Between the ultimate ideals of the East and the West there is a
radical antagonism; the Eastern ideal is that of renunciation and
nirvana, the Western that of combat and ever more exuberant
life. Yet from time to time, notably by the adoption of
Christianity, and more recently by the revived interest in
Buddhism, we European Barbarians have ardently adopted the Eastern
ideals. Nietzsche in his later days thought that this Eastern
influence was altogether damnable. But M. de Gaultier points out
that this has not been so. The extreme violence of the Western
spirit would lead to self-destruction if maintained; the ideal of
renunciation which we adopted with Christianity has not been
attained, but it has served to temper, in a very necessary manner,
our native Western violence; it has fortified rather than enfeebled
it. It has acted like those narcotics which in large doses are
indeed poisons, but in moderation are beneficial sedatives. In the
same way the Eastern hatred of sex and glorification of chastity
really aided to re-people the Western world. Rome died for lack of
men. But any moralist who at Rome had preached in a straightforward
and logical manner the necessity of marriage and large families
would have been unheard. The Christian monks came, and by preaching
to men to trample sex under foot they really turned its energy into
the channel of marriage, and indirectly and unintentionally
re-peopled the failing Western world. M. de Gaultier delights to
point out how throughout life we are led by roads that seem to lead
in one direction to ends that lie in a totally opposed direction.
Our Bovaryisms are fictions, but they are fictions that Life uses
to lead us to goals we never desired to attain. M. de Gaultier
might have taken as his motto the words with which Goethe summed up
the experiences of Wilhelm Meister: "You seem to me like Saul, the
son of Kish, who went forth to seek his father's asses and found a
kingdom."

It is unnecessary to follow M. de Gaultier further. Enough has
probably been said to show that he is a thinker whose books cannot
fail to be fascinating to those who interest themselves in the
philosophic criticism of life and of art. We are easily prone to
direct our attention so closely to the technical details of our own
little field of study that we fall into spiritual provincialism,
and, like children absorbed by the search for treasure among the
rocks, we do not see that the rising sea is fatally cutting us off
from the great earth. We owe a debt of gratitude to writers like
Jules de Gaultier who, whatever the intrinsic value of their
philosophic conceptions may be, show us the tracks that run from
our own small district to the larger world, and in so doing render
more vital and profound even our possession of that small
district.

XVI. THE GENIUS OF FRANCE

This article was suggested by the writings of Lean
Bazalgette, who died two years ago, regretted by many and best
known outside France as a pioneer in making known Whitman to French
readers, a work to which he devoted much of his life, and was
inspired to undertake—as he told me and as I am pleased to
recall—by an essay in my NEW SPIRIT. The article appeared in
the WEEKLY CRITICAL REVIEW for October 22nd, 1903. To-day one reads
it with a surprised smile. Neither inside nor outside France is the
Frenchman individually or France collectively regarded as in urgent
need of the gospel of strenuousness which Bazalgette was preaching
thirty years ago. Indeed some nowadays think that the Frenchman has
taken almost too seriously Bazalgette's injunction to "enlarge his
country's activities."

OF recent years various able writers in France have proclaimed
very emphatically the decadence of the so-called Latin nations and
the inferiority of the French compared with the Anglo-Saxons. Among
these writers M. Leon Bazalgette occupies a distinguished position
both on account of the clearness and decision of his attitude and
the very faithful manner in which he deals with his
fellow-countrymen. M. Bazalgette first proved his right to an
opinion on this question in a volume of essays, L'Esprit
Nouveau, published some years ago, in which he discussed in a
highly intelligent and sympathetic manner various modern questions
of art and life. Two years ago followed the book, A quoi tient
l'Infériorité Française, with which his name is most closely
identified. Now in Le Problème de l'Avenir Latin he presents
us with the most definite and comprehensive statement of his views
on the past, present, and future of the Latin peoples generally,
but more especially of France. One cannot pay a better compliment
to his book than to say that it evokes reflections on the most
fundamental questions concerning the precise nature of the genius
of France.

M. Bazalgette's statement of the historical evolution of France
is not difficult to summarise. He is well aware that there is no
Latin race, and that we are only dealing with civilisations, but on
this basis he distinguishes a Latin and a Germanic world, the
former including all those territories which were reduced by Rome
to provinces (the special case of Great Britain being reserved), by
the latter those barbarous countries which refused to submit to
Roman dominion; the first group still remain Roman in religion, the
second group showed its hereditary resistance to Rome by becoming
Protestant. Racially, M. Bazalgette regards Gaul as substantially
identical with the Germanic lands at the outset; its ultimate
dissimilarity from the German nations he attributes solely to Latin
domination. The fall of Imperial Rome made no difference to this
domination, for Roman Christianity flowed into the channels of the
Empire, and Latin influence persisted. France made two great but
unsuccessful efforts, however, to obtain that individuality which
the German peoples found it more easy to preserve: the first at the
Reformation, the second at the Revolution. The German nations,
preserving more of the primitive strength and being nearer to
Nature, have succeeded; France and other Latin nations, having been
morally castrated in childhood, have remained inferior. These
statements M. Bazal-gette regards as unquestionable facts.

We must be allowed, however, to point out that these facts of M.
Bazalgette's are by no means so unquestionable as he seems to
believe. We cannot admit that the Romans found in Gaul a people who
were identical with the Germans. Caesar remarks that the manners
and customs of the Gauls differed widely from those of the Germans,
and it is clear from his narrative that in matters of war the
Gaulish tribes situated nearest to German territory, and,
therefore, most nearly related to them, were the most powerful, so
that we are not entitled to assume that Roman influence rendered
the Gauls weak in resistance. The rapidity of the Roman conquest
shows that the difference existed at the outset, and Strabo's
picture of the Gauls brings before us a people not notably and
essentially different from the modern French. Nor can we agree that
the Reformation in France represented a recrudescence of the
crushed Germanic spirit. It is true that Calvin sprang from the
people occupying that district which Caesar found most warlike, and
which we may regard as most Teutonic, but the great Protestant
district of France has always been in the south-west, the region
which is least Germanic. Nor, again, can we regard the Revolution
as a Germanic upheaval; among the complex movements which led up to
that crisis Roman ideals and examples played a large part as well
as the more Germanic influences of Rousseauism, and men of the
South were as active as men of the North.

Even, however, if we could accept M. Bazal-gette's facts it
would still be necessary to demur to his interpretations. It would
ill become an Anglo-Saxon to speak ill of individualism, but it has
to be recognised that, precious as individualism is, it is still
not a quality to be sought at all costs, nor is it by any means the
only constituent of high civilisation. There is no country in
Europe in which racial and temperamental characteristics vary so
widely as in France. France is, indeed, the microcosm of all
Europe. Moreover, the mobility and the vivacity of the race have
attracted attention from the first. It may not unfairly be said
that so far from lacking in individuality, there is no country in
which human individuality has been carried so far as in France. In
the absence of those cohering elements of Roman civilisation which,
to M. Bazalgette's regret, Gaul adopted so eagerly and clung to so
persistently, France has always tended to suffer from the divergent
individuality of its various parts. It was so before the Romans
came; again, in the darkness of the ninth century, described by
Salvianus, before the Church had re-established Roman influence,
the same tendency to strife and dissolution is found; and, without
desiring to look on the Revolution as a mere manifestation of "the
red fool fury of the Seine," it is still permissible to find in it
an illustration of the violence of French individuality
unrestrained by the Latin spirit. It is very difficult, indeed, to
see how a great and coherent civilisation could have developed from
elements so highly individual, so sensitively unstable, if it had
not been for the restraining influence of those Latin traditions of
order and form, of fine convention, of clear reasonableness, which
have served to limit—however unfortunate we may think this
limiting influence to be in special cases—the splendid and
various genius of France. On this matter the greatest rulers who
have moulded France, the Germanic Charlemagne and the Italian
Napoleon, were at one. The finest manifestations of life, indeed,
always develop under restraint; we have but to look at the capsules
of flower-buds or the fronds of ferns. Nature can only form her
most exquisite children under the pressure of the hard and firm
womb, and by destroying the ensheathing capsule we would also
destroy the fruit. It is not otherwise in the world of the
spirit.

While, however, we cannot accept M. Bazalgette as either
historian or philosopher without much questioning, as a moralist he
is more acceptable, and it is, perhaps, as a moralist that he
chiefly desires to be accepted. His polemic against Latinisation,
then, becomes the appeal of the preacher of righteousness to his
fellow-countrymen to make to themselves stronger bodies and more
energetic minds, to work more strenuously for the enlargement of
their country's activities, and to learn all that may be learnt
from the example of other countries. How well able M. Bazalgette
is, notwithstanding the impossibly heroic nature of some of his
remedies for the evils of France, to reflect wisely on the
character and fate of nations, we may observe in the concluding
chapter, entitled "Optimisme," in which he clearly recognises that
every nation, like every individual, has a life-history and can
never hope to be always young or always vigorous. In one of the
best pages in his book he recognises how, with all the defects that
he finds in her, France still to-day possesses the prestige of "the
great field of idealism in the world," of a consummate knowledge in
the art of living, that she is the world's playground of art, a
"monde-femme" with the seduction of all the things that are apart
from the brutalities of rough virility, yet with the charm of
extreme maturity, of long culture and tradition, with the haunting
perfume of the past. These things—with others of at least
equally serious import which might well have been added—are
of the very essence of civilisation, and we scarcely need to waste
vain lamentations over a Latinisation which has helped to achieve
them.

XVII. THE PROPHET SHAW

This essay was published in the WEEKLY CRITICAL REVIEW for
January 15th, 1904.

An intelligent critic of Mr. George Bernard Shaw's Man and
Superman—without doubt the author's most notable and
mature book—entitled his article "The New St. Bernard." There
was a certain felicity in this emphasis of the resemblance between
Mr. Shaw's attitude and that of the great saint with whom he is so
closely connected. The famous Christian ascetics of mediaeval
times, and very notably St. Bernard, delighted to disrobe beauty of
its garment of illusion; with cold hands and ironical smile they
undertook the task of analysing its skin-deep fascination, and
presented, for the salutary contemplation of those affected by the
lust of the eyes, the vision of what seemed to them the real Woman,
deprived of her skin. In the same spirit Mr Shaw—developing
certain utterances in Nietzsche's Zarathustra—has
sought to analyse the fascination of women as an illusion of which
the reality is the future mother's search of a husband for her
child; and hell for Mr. Shaw is a place where people talk about
beauty and the ideal, While, however, it may be admitted that there
is a very real affinity between Mr. Shaw's point of view in this
matter and that of the old ascetics—who, it may be remarked,
were often men of keen analytic intelligence and a passionately
ironic view of life—it seems doubtful whether on the whole he
is most accurately classified among the saints. It is probable that
he is more fittingly placed among the prophets, an allied but still
distinct species. The prophet, as we may study him in his numerous
manifestations during several thousand years, is usually something
of an artist and something of a scientist, but he is altogether a
moralist. He foresees the future, it is true—and so far the
vulgar definition of the prophet is correct—but he does not
necessarily foresee it accurately. The prophet is so profoundly
convinced that his fellow-countrymen are on the morally wrong road
that he foretells for them a goal of damnation unless they repent;
whether he has foretold the truth depends considerably on the
accuracy of his diagnosis of the present; but whether this
diagnosis is right or wrong in no way interferes with his nature
and function as a prophet. The prophet is a moralist, and a
passionate and revolutionary moralist; for as Renan remarked in his
Histoire du Peuple d'Israël, even the old Hebrew prophets
were the sort of people whom we nowadays call Socialists and
Anarchists.

It has always been a great—one may even say a
fatal—difficulty in the prophet's path that he is bound to be
an artist. He is bound to be an artist because it is essential that
he should have hearers, and not be merely vox clamantis in
deserto. He must have listeners, and to secure them he must be
charming, witty, epigrammatic, he must insinuate his anathemas
against society into a stream of beautiful eloquence. Only on this
condition will he be heard. But the unhappy prophet soon discovers
that it is the artist who is heard, not the moralist. Jeremiah
realised this with bitterness several thousand years ago: "And now
am I become unto them," he complained, "as one that hath a pleasant
voice and can play well on an instrument." Another prophet in a
later age, St. Jerome, was wont to lament the eloquent style by
which he merely charmed his readers when he sought to transfix them
with the arrows of his indignation. Of Mr. Shaw it is commonly said
that he is an Irishman, and therewith his hearers excuse themselves
for greeting the moralist with a smile. There are not, however, so
many Irishmen as is commonly supposed, and without knowing anything
concerning his ancestry, one may suspect that on examination Mr.
Shaw might turn out to be not so very much more Irish than another
and greater "Irishman," Swift. One would be by no means surprised
to find behind Mr. Shaw a long array of stolid, Puritanical,
God-fearing Englishmen. It may or may not be so, but in any case,
we may be sure, the prophet's reception would be the same. Mr. Shaw
pines to be dragged to the stake, but the public only hears the
pleasant voice and the well-played instrument. "Bravo! Encore!"
That is always the prophet's tragedy.

It is not alone the conflict between the artist and the moralist
that brings the prophet to disaster. There is an inevitable
conflict between the scientist and the moralist which also leads
the prophet astray. He is bound to be in some degree a scientist,
whether he would have it so or whether he would not. It is of the
very essence of his function as prophet that he should possess a
keen and penetrative vision into his own time, the man of science's
power of analysing its conditions. His moral remedies must rest on
a preliminary diagnosis which has revealed evils where to other men
are no evils. To this extent the prophet is necessarily a
scientist. But a dominant impulse to moralise will not work in
harness with the scientific instinct, which is solely concerned
with striving to see things as they are and not in hastening to
declare what they ought to be. We have here therefore a
contradiction at the prophet's central core. He is certainly
anxious to see things as they really are, but the prophetic impulse
leads him to strike at them and buffet them and cast them down from
their pedestals, and in so doing it is impossible for him to see
them as they really are. "We read the satires of our fathers'
contemporaries," Mr. Shaw remarks, "and we think how much better we
are;" he would have us read his satire of us and realise how bad we
are. If, however, we look into the matter from a point of view
other than the moralist's, we may realise that, in the one case and
in the other, satire tells us very little. Those of us who have had
occasion to look into, let us say, the private records and
documents of the much-abused eighteenth century have learnt to
discern a life very different from that which alone becomes visible
in satires. There is not the slightest reason for supposing that
the satires on ourselves are any more reliable than those on our
fathers. The ordinary life of mankind with its everyday virtues and
everyday vices is too commonplace for the purposes of literature;
it is inevitably exalted, and more often degraded, in the most
accomplished hands. Moliere was an artist-moralist of the highest
order and his pictures of the "Precieuses" and of "Tartuffe" are
counted immortal. But Moliere gives us no hint that the
"Precieuses" whom he ridicules were engaged on a reforming task of
the first importance, and modern investigation shows that
"Tartuffe" belonged to a brotherhood which was really of
unblameable rectitude. Such discriminative considerations do not,
however, appeal to the prophet, and for the good of our souls he
lashes us unmercifully with the scorpions of his wrath. Mr. Shaw
never fails to point the finger of scorn at the rotten morality of
England, but one perceives that it is always the moralist that is
speaking and not the careful critic who has weighed England in the
balance with other lands and decided at what precise points it is
that she falls short. This leads to a certain kind of undesigned
insincerity.

The scene of Man and Superman is partly laid in Spain. It
is evident from many little indications that Mr. Shaw has visited
Spain, at all events Granada, of all Spanish cities, be it noted,
the most Anglicised. The Spanish people have been called by one who
knows them well, the best people in the world, and here, one might
suppose, the moralist has at last found rest and peace, but to
suppose any such thing would involve ignorance of the prophet's
nature. One searches Mr. Shaw's I pages in vain for any perception
of the special I qualities of Spain. He describes truthfully enough
the little boys at Granada who—taught by English
tourists—hold out their hands automatically for coppers, but
he has not met the more typical Spanish beggar, who, when you give
him a penny, insists that you shall accept from him a farthing in
return. We speedily realise that if Mr. Shaw should ever feel it
his duty to shake from off his feet the dust of this doomed English
land and settle in Spain, he would soon begin to pine for the
country he had left. He would never be able to forget that, with
all her shortcomings, England is still the sacred home of
Fabianism, of vegetarianism, of anti-vivisectionism, of
anti-vaccinationism, of who knows how many other of those "isms" so
dear to the prophet's soul, and even by the waters of Seville he
would hang up his harp and weep.

The moralist in the prophet must not only have a people to
preach at, he must have a doctrine to preach, and here again his
morality comes into conflict with his science. For many years past
Mr. Shaw has zealously preached a great many social doctrines
which, with growth of years and a deeper insight into the nature of
man and the structure of society, have more and more seemed to him
merely to touch the surface of life, and in his latest book he has
plainly declared that these doctrines of his youth are little
better than illusions. Now, he declares, he has no illusions on the
subject of "education, progress, and so forth;" the "mere
transfiguration of institutions" is but a change "from Tweedledum
to Tweedledee." In this matter Mr. Shaw is true to the universal
tradition of the prophet, who always tends to exhibit a growing
discontent with those changes which merely touch the surface of
life and an ever more passionate desire to get to the roots of it;
and on these questions Mr. Shaw says many wise and profound things
which we should do well to lay to heart. But in the sweeping away
of illusions the prophet can never go to the bitter end, for if
there were no illusions left, he would find himself in an
atmosphere of quietism in which no prophet could live. However
relentless his scientific realism may be, the prophet, to be a
prophet, must always remain an idealist at heart.

Mr. Shaw has flung away many illusions but only in order to
entrench himself more firmly on one remaining illusion, the
"Superman." It is a vision that, from the time of Isaiah and
earlier, has always floated before the prophet's eyes and has
always proved irresistibly attractive to him: the supreme future
man, the Messiah who will build up a new Earth, and whose path it
is our business to make straight. There has never been a prophet
who was not inflamed by that vision.

Let us be cautious, however, how we use the word "illusion"
here. Mr. Shaw will have it that love—and a fortiori
the virtues ascribed to human institutions—are illusions,
while the "Superman" is a piece of solid reality. When the doctrine
is so stated, it is necessary to point out that this verity will
not resist critical analysis any better than the others, and that
it is by no means difficult to flay the "Superman" even before he
is born. It is enough to say in passing that, granting to Mr. Shaw
that "our only hope is in evolution," the line of evolution has
never been straight; in the natural course of things the successor
of man would spring from a form lower than man; but as we have
checked the lower forms of life at every point, we have effectually
killed the "Superman." If he were to dig again into that
Nietzschian mine whence he extracted the "Superman," Mr. Shaw might
find another doctrine very much to the present point, the doctrine,
that is to say, of the justification of "illusions" in so far as
they are vitally woven into the texture of life and have aided in
upholding humanity on its course. Love is such an "illusion," the
most solid reality in all the world, and without love, hard indeed
will be the struggle "to replace the man by the Superman."

It is so common for Mr. Shaw's critics to treat him as a
superior bufibon that the reader may possibly be puzzled, or even
shocked, when asked to place him among the prophets. But we have
here no paradox. This confusion between prophet and buffoon has
always been made, and for the excellent reason that underneath it
there is a real fusion. No one can question the tremendous
earnestness of the old Hebrew prophets, yet many of their doings
hardly bear repetition to modern ears. None of our latter-day
prophets has been more simple-minded and zealous than Carlyle, yet
in Carlyle's writings there is no species of literary buffoonery
which you will not find exemplified. In the Middle Ages indeed we
may say that there was no refuge anywhere for the prophet except
under the jester's cap and bells, which served him as a protection
against the wild beasts he bearded in princes' courts. One way or
another our Daniels have frequently had to make their homes in
lions' dens, and the jester's cap has been found to exert a useful
hypnotic influence on the beasts.

A prophet is not an entirely satisfactory person to the artist
or to the scientist or even to the moralist. He is, as Mr. Shaw
observes, "a most intensely refractory person." He is a medium
through which we are forced to see the world at a new and extreme
angle, and we rebel at this refraction of our comfortable every-day
vision. But even in our rebellion our hold of the world becomes
more vital. It is no accident that the most vitally and tenaciously
alive people that ever appeared on the earth has produced the most
prophets.

England is poor in prophets and we need to cherish them whenever
they appear among us.

XVIII. ANOTHER PROPHET: H. G.
WELLS

This was published in the WEEKLY CRITICAL REVIEW for February
19th, 1904.

ALTHOUGH prophets are nowadays rare among us, Mr. Bernard Shaw
is not absolutely alone. We have others, and among them not one is
better worth listening to than Mr. H. G. Wells. As we have seen, a
prophet may be defined as a person who is something of a scientist
and something of an artist and altogether a moralist. In science,
while Mr. Shaw has occupied himself with political economy, Mr.
Wells has had the advantage of a training in physical and
biological work; as in art, just as Mr. Shaw has amused himself
with writing plays, Mr. Wells has developed a singularly original
kind of fiction, and thereby attained a wide reputation, not only
in England, but also in France, being indeed the only Englishman so
far assigned a place in the "Célébrités d'Aujourd'hui" series. As a
moralist, Mr. Shaw is more brilliant and accomplished, for from the
outset he has clearly held before him this most conspicuous part of
the prophet's duty. Mr.

Wells has here been somewhat shy and reticent; though he has
frequently put a certain amount of morality into his fiction he has
usually been anxious that it should only be visible to those who
know how to find it; even a prophet must live, he seems to have
said to himself; it is only within the last few years, in the
maturity of his power and reputation, that he has boldly stepped
into the public arena conspicuously enfolded in the prophet's
mantle. With these points of resemblance in the two men there are
yet very marked differences, founded on essential divergences of
temperament. If the analogy of the bull-fight were not too
irreverent for the occasion, it might be said that Mr. Shaw
performs his prophetic functions in the spirit of the banderillero;
he approaches the stolid British bull with graceful bravado, not
anxious to conceal from us the tremendous personal risks he is
running, he brandishes his darts before the creature's eyes, and
having adroitly planted them in its hide he retires, well satisfied
that he has goaded it to fury and precipitated its final
destruction. Mr. Wells, on the other hand, it is evident, emulates
the methods of the matador; there is no airy aggressiveness here
(unless, indeed, when he takes the animal before him to stand for
the British schoolmaster), his manner is simple, seemingly
placable, he holds his weapon behind his back, and he seeks to make
the stroke of it direct, downright, decisive. Then let the New
Republic be proclaimed forthwith! It is thus that Mr. Wells comes
before us in his recent and extremely able book, Mankind in the
Making.

It scarcely seems to me that this "New Republic" of Mr. Wells's
is quite a happy term. He uses it in no genuinely political sense,
while its literary associations, from Plato to Mr. Mallock, do not
greatly help him. The "New Republic" of Mr. Wells has no relation
to any existing party or faction. The New Republican has absorbed
the modern conception of evolution, and the only social and
political movements in which he is interested are those that "make
for sound births and sound growth." His creed is thus expressed:
"We are here to get better births and a better result from the
births we get; each one of us is going to set himself immediately
to that, using whatever power he finds to his hand." We live in a
land, as Mr. Wells puts it, into which there may be said to be a
spout discharging a baby every eight seconds. All our statesmen,
philanthropists, public men, parties and institutions are engaged
in a struggle to deal with the stream of babies which no man can
stop. "Our success or failure with that unending stream of babies
is the measure of our civilisation."

The problem with which Mr. Wells seeks to deal—whether or
not we care to adopt the "New Republican" label—is certainly
of the first importance. To those few of us who reached this same
standpoint many years back, and are trying to work towards the
elucidation of the problem, it is a genuine satisfaction to find
this question brought into the market-place so vigorously, so
sanely, so intelligently. If a few critical comments have occurred
to me as I followed Mr. Wells in his discussion of this tremendous
problem, I set them down with no ungracious wish to minimise the
value of his services in the cause he has undertaken to preach,
which is, after all, the cause of all of us. To survey life and to
reorganise it, on so broad and sweeping a scale as Mr. Wells
attempts, necessarily brings him into a great many fields which
have been appropriated by specialists. Mr. Wells quite realises the
dangers he thus runs, but it can by no means be said that he has
altogether escaped them. In this way he sometimes seems to be led
into unnecessary confusions and contradictions. One may observe
this in the discussion of heredity which is inevitably a main part
of his theme. Mr. Francis Gallon has proposed that we should seek
to improve the human race as we improve our horses and dogs, by
careful breeding, in order to develop their best qualities. Mr.
Wells argues, quite soundly in my opinion, that this will not work
out, that we do not know what qualities we want to breed, nor how
we are to get them. But Mr. Wells rushes to the other extreme when,
without exactly proposing it, he suggests that there may be nothing
unreasonable in mating people of insane family with "dull,
stagnant, respectable people," in the hope that the mixture will
turn out just right. We do certainly know, that as a rule mad
people are most decidedly not examples of "genius out of hand,"
but, on the contrary, people who have got into a monotonous rut
that they cannot lift themselves out of; they are far more dull and
stagnant than the respectable people, and the suggested mixture is
scarcely hopeful. Again, Mr. Wells argues that, before we can make
progress with this question of breeding desirable qualities, we
require to be able to weed out those human qualities which are
"preeminently undesirable," and then he proceeds to cast contempt
on the study of criminology. But criminals represent exactly those
stocks in the community which possess most of the pre-eminently
undesirable qualities, and if we wish to weed such qualities out we
cannot study criminology too carefully. It is certainly true that
many foolish things have been said in the name of criminal
anthropology, but so sagacious a thinker as Mr. Wells can have no
difficulty in realising that it is unnecessary to pour away the
baby with the bath. Another more fundamental criticism occurs as we
read Mr. Wells's pages, and one that more closely touches his
prophetic mission. He appears before us as the apostle of
Evolution; he states briefly, as a self-evident proposition, that
"man will rise to be overman;" the New Republican is always to bear
that in mind. But while such a belief is certainly an aid to an
inspiring gospel of life, it can by no means be admitted that it is
self-evident. On the contrary, from an evolutionary point of view,
there is not the slightest reason to suppose that man will ever
rise to be overman. Evolution never proceeds far in a straight
line, and while it is undoubtedly true that intelligence is a
factor in evolution, it is by no means true that a very high degree
of intelligence is specially likely to lead to the evolution of its
possessor, it may even hinder it. Many species of ants are highly
intelligent and "civilised"—in some respects more so than
various human peoples—yet we do not hear of the "super-ant,"
nor is it likely that we shall. As regards man it might be
plausibly maintained that the typical Man reached his fullest and
finest all-round development, as the highest zoological species, in
the Stone Age some ten thousand years ago, that the Superman really
began to arise with the discovery of writing, the growth of
tradition and the multiplication of inventions some six or eight
thousand years ago, and that we have now reached, not the beginning
of the Superman but the beginning of the end of him. All we know of
the "evolution" of man in historical times is that each nation in
turn has had its rise and its fall, breaking like a wave on the
sands of time, but no man can say that the tide itself is clearly
rising; as likely as not it is at the turn, for there are not many
new nations left. We only know that there is movement, a little
constant oscillation, that for all we know may be backwards and
forwards in equal measure. No man can definitely say that France
has produced finer persons than Greece, or England than Rome. We
have all had a good conceit of ourselves; each of us in turn has
believed that "we are the people." It is a belief that has helped
us to make the best of ourselves.

And here we are led to the only remaining criticism of the New
Republic that I have to offer. One feels throughout Mr. Wells's
prophesyings a certain note of what I may perhaps venture to call
without offence, parochialism. The evolution of man, if it means
anything, must affect the whole species, and not a single section.
Mr. Wells confines himself exclusively to the English-speaking
lands, and through a great part of his book he is very much
occupied with tinkering at some of our cherished English
institutions. The preacher who set out by proclaiming salvation for
mankind invites us to contribute to the fund for the new organ. Not
only is Mr. Wells's "mankind" thus narrowly limited, he even
objects to the study of other nations. Ancient languages he taboos
altogether; a knowledge of modern languages he regards as "a rather
irksome necessity, of little or no educational value." He rightly
insists that the pressing business of education is "to widen the
range of intercourse," yet he fails to see that the possession of a
key to the unfamiliar thoughts and feelings of an unknown people is
the one effectual method by which such an end can be attained. It
is vain to say that of most good books there are more or less good
translations. The educational value of a language lies less in the
statements contained in its literature than in its own
untranslatable atmosphere, which brings us into a new sphere of
influences and places us at a fresh point of view. The
contradiction in Mr. Wells's attitude is still further emphasised
by the fact that he very rightly insists on the importance of a
thorough knowledge of the English language and literature. Yet it
may safely be said that, putting aside a very few exceptional men
of genius, there have been no great masters of English who were
without insight and knowledge as regards at least one or two
foreign languages, while the people whose ill-treatment of English
arouses Mr. Wells's indignation will rarely indeed be found to know
any language but their own. It could scarcely be otherwise, for the
man who can never look at his own language from the outside and
estimate by comparison its exact structure and force is unlikely
ever to become a master of it. Mr. Wells carries his insularity so
far that he will not even admit any decency or virtue to the lower
human races; the savage, he says, is simply a creature who smells
and rots and starves. Mr. Wells is scornful of his "untravelled"
fellow-prophets in the eighteenth century, who held up the savage
for imitation. But our travelled modern prophet has been a little
unfortunate in his experiences, nor was the eighteenth century by
any means untravelled. It was, indeed, the opening up of the
Pacific at that time and the quaint accurate narratives of Cook,
Bougainville and the other great navigators that enabled Rousseau
and Diderot to use the Polynesian for the purposes of edification
as effectively as Tacitus used the German.

If, however, Mr. Wells is sometimes led into unwarrantable
extremes of statement, it is generally easy to see that he is so
led by his moralising purpose, and that he is legitimately
exercising the prophetic function. How admirable a moralist he is
may be clearly seen in the chapter entitled "The Cultivation of the
Imagination." Here he deals with the question of the methods by
which the boy or girl should be initiated into the knowledge of all
that makes manhood and womanhood. It is a delicate question, but it
could not well be discussed in a more sane, wholesame, frank, and
yet reticent manner. In such a discussion Mr. Wells is at his best;
he enables us to realise that we are perhaps advancing beyond "that
age of nasty sentiment, sham delicacy, and giggles," as he calls
the Victorian era; it is here that he shows how significant a
prophet he is of the twentieth century.

XIX. FARE AND WELFARE

This paper on problems of food and drink was written at the
request of the editor of THE DAILY GRAPHIC, and published on
October 2nd, 1905.

THE question of diet is one of those questions which are so
fundamental that we seldom realise their importance or devote much
time to their serious discussion. The instinct of nutrition thus
resembles the only other great instinct whose roots are equally
deep within us, the instinct of reproduction. We need not, however,
fall back on the familiar German witticism that what a man eats a
man is ("Man ist was er ist") in order to realise the pervading
influence of diet on our activities or on our happiness.

Yet there is a certain rightness in the general indifference to
doctrinal statements in the matter of diet. There are no general
rules that will hold good for all men. One man's meat, according to
the ancient saying, is another man's poison. Indeed, the people who
preach the rightness of special methods of diet usually do so on
altogether non-dietary grounds. Such and such a diet, they tell us,
is good, not because it suits us, but because it conforms to that
of man's ape-like ancestors, or because it is what we may conceive
to have been the food of Paradise, or because it is what we may,
for humanitarian or other reasons, guess that the coming and
perfected man of the future will eat. No doubt, within certain
limits, it will happen that what we persuade ourselves is good will
actually tend to suit us; but all these are considerations which,
from the strict point of view of diet, we ought to waive aside.

It must, indeed, always be remembered that there are certain
facts of our nature with which all our theories and habits must be
made to fit. It is the proud pre-eminence of man to be more nearly
omnivorous than any other animal. No other animal is prepared to
eat such a variety of things in such a variety of shapes, and to
benefit so greatly by the variety. But all these things must be
digested in ways that are not easily modifiable. Each special
constituent of our diet—albuminous, starchy, or
fatty—has its own special processes to go through with
special glandular organs that are adapted to it, so that there is a
large field of physiological chemistry now devoted to the study of
digestion, the results so far attained in this field being well and
fully set forth by the late Dr. Lockhart Gillespie in his
Natural History of Digestion.

In this way it comes about that, for everybody, it is not
advisable to take much liquid with solid food, since thus the
digestive fluids are unduly diluted (for this reason much thin soup
is objectionable), that bread must be masticated with much greater
care than meat, since it requires saliva for its digestive
transformations (it is interesting to observe how the dog,
realising this in practice, will painfully chew bread, though he
calmly swallows large lumps of meat or bone), that a certain amount
of rest, both for muscle and brain, is always desirable immediately
after a meal, or otherwise the blood stream is diverted from the
main task before it at the stomach.

When, however, these and other general verities are accepted, as
they must be, it remains true that diet is very largely a matter
for individual experience and judgment. The digestive system is
complex and extensive, it exhibits all sorts of individual
variations, it is subject to the influence of habit, and anyone who
carefully observes himself will find that at some point or other
his experience differs from what he has always been taught to
expect. In matters of detail, therefore, it is impossible to lay
down rules of diet for the world at large. Whatever may be said in
favour of a universal fashion in clothing—and probably it is
not much—there is nothing to be said in favour of a universal
fashion in diet.

One of the main points on which marked differences of opinion
have been expressed is concerning the rival merits of what may be
called the old English and the Continental order of meals. The
first, the diminuendo system, involves a very hearty breakfast, a
substantial dinner soon after midday, a tea meal, and a light
supper. The Continental, the crescendo system, begins with coffee
and roll, followed by a moderately substantial meal at or before
midday, and ends with a more or less elaborate dinner. It is argued
in favour of the English system that the heartiest meal should be
eaten in the morning, when the energies are most fresh and
vigorous, and if we wish to devote ourselves entirely to eating
that argument is doubtless sound. But it is precisely because the
energies are freshest in the morning that it may be thought well to
reserve them as much as possible for work, leaving the chief meal
to the time of day when our nervous energies are no longer
distracted by mental work, and many of us find that this is the
order of meals which best suits us, though it is not always
practicable to follow it in England. The English method of eating
needs very robust digestive powers, and many of us, especially if
we work with our heads and cannot always live much in the open air,
greatly prefer the Continental method. I should myself be inclined
to say that the best meals are to be found in Paris (I do not say
all France), in some parts of Italy, and in Spain (where the
cookery must not be judged by hotels which cater for the
foreigner). English meals are too often dull, heavy, monotonous,
unattractive, and, with all their seeming simplicity, very
expensive. I write these lines during a ramble in Suffolk, and my
fare has usually been eggs and bacon for breakfast, bread and
cheese and ale for lunch, cold meat for dinner, and, under the
influence of the outdoor life, the bright air, the charm of ancient
inns, such fare becomes delicious. But I am well aware that in many
European countries I can live, not only far more luxuriously, but
far more wholesomely, for half the sum I pay here. It is a mistake
to suppose that simplicity is of necessity either cheap or easy.
Our old English living is the ideal for ploughboys, but in
proportion as our work and our method of life strain our nerves
rather than our muscles, we may wisely attempt to fashion our modes
of diet somewhat more after the best Continental models, though by
no means blindly or indiscriminately. Good cooking must always need
a little money, a considerable amount of skill, and a very large
amount of intelligence. It is not a matter of which anyone need
disdain to have some knowledge.

A word as to the question of drinks. Nowadays alcohol and tea
are alike fiercely assailed. But in this matter we must exercise
discrimination and steer clear of the faddist. In a hot country
there is no more delicious drink than water; but in a land where
earth and air are too often soaked with water, of a very inferior
quality, it seems less delightful. A little light French or Rhine
wine, taken only with meals, is one of the best of drinks. It is
important to remember that alcohol is not, as was formerly
supposed, strictly a stimulant. Even if it were, stimulants of all
kinds are a mistake, and, as Fere has recently shown in his
fascinating work, Travail et Plaisir, stimulation of every
kind, whatever sense it is applied to, produces a sudden rise in
capacity for work which is always more than compensated by a rapid
fall. Alcohol, however, is really a sedative and a narcotic, and
its value is that it agreeably lulls an over-worked or excited
brain, and thus indirectly, and to some extent even directly, aids
digestion. Good light wines are not, however, always easy to obtain
in England at a reasonable price, and probably the best substitute,
especially in summer, is lager beer. This, as made in Germany, is
not only very slightly alcoholic, but has been found to contain a
valuable digestive ferment, so that it may be drunk with advantage
by many who find English bottled beers almost a poison. Spirits are
better avoided, except with some special object (when other drugs
would act as well), and the recent craze for whisky—of which,
as now manufactured, we know little or nothing—is somewhat
foolish. Coffee, in England, is usually taken after dinner but not
after lunch. It would be better to reverse that custom, if black
coffee is only to be taken once a day, for we need our mental
activity in the afternoon more than at night. Tea is undoubtedly
greatly abused among us in England, and there is little to be said
in favour of a tea meal, for three good meals a day are amply
adequate. There is, however, much to be said for the habit of
taking tea alone in the course of the afternoon, but it should be
pure China tea, made very weak (as so little is required it is not
really more expensive than Indian tea), and drunk with a slice of
lemon in the Russian fashion. There is no more refreshing beverage,
and it is perfectly harmless in any amount. Moreover, if little is
to be drunk at meals, an opportunity is thus afforded for absorbing
the fluid which is needed to purify the body, and which always has
an exhilarating influence on the nervous activities. Sir Lauder
Brunton has truly pointed out that in England women
especially—unlike their French sisters, who better understand
the art of living—usually drink far too little.

It will be seen that the general drift of these remarks is in
favour of some approximation to the best Continental methods of
eating and drinking—not, indeed, from the ploughboy's point
of view, but certainly for people who exercise their nervous
systems and are too often conscious of the process of digestion.
But in the end it must again be emphasised that in this matter
variety is excellent. We must be shy of the faddists—though,
like the new sect of the chewers, their practices often embody a
counsel of perfection which we may do well to bear in
mind—and even if we hold to a very strict and narrow regime,
an occasional orgy is desirable, if only on moral grounds. Our diet
ought to be the outcome of our own individual experience and
observation and skill and taste. Our final ideal may well be
simplicity, but in the art of eating, as in other arts, there is
nothing in the world so hard to attain as simplicity.

XX. FOREL ON THE SEXUAL
QUESTION

This review of Forel's comprehensive work, DIE SEXUELLE
FRAGE, afterwards translated into English, appeared in the JOURNAL
OF MENTAL SCIENCE in 1906.

PROFESSOR FOREL has always taken a catholic view of the
alienist's functions. Throughout his career he has occupied himself
with the most various psychic phenomena, from the aptitudes of ants
to the mysterious workings of the subliminal consciousness. Nor has
he at any time shirked the responsibility of the physician to
declare fearlessly the claim of medicine to be heard in the
reasonable ordering of social institutions. Now, in old age, having
come to the conclusion that every man ought to set forth his
beliefs in regard to so vitally important a problem as that of sex,
he has written this book, which he describes on the title-page as
"a biological, psychological, hygienic, and sociological study for
cultured people," and dedicated it to his wife. It is without doubt
the most comprehensive, and, taking into account its
many-sidedness, perhaps the ablest work which has yet appeared on
the sex question. This seems to have been understood in Germany,
for, although the book can scarcely appeal to any but very serious
readers, 25,000 copies have already been sold, and this fifth
edition appears within a few months of the original issue.

The author is undoubtedly well equipped for the gigantic task
which he has set himself. A doctor of philosophy and of law, as
well as of medicine, he is able to take a very wide view of the
problem he approaches, while even on the medical side his interest
in human life generally saves him from approaching questions of sex
too exclusively from the basis of his asylum experience; and his
sound and able discussion of pathological sexuality occupies a duly
subordinated place. There are certainly serious disadvantages in
Professor Forel's ambitious scheme, and it cannot be said that he
has escaped the defects of his methods. The various aspects of the
sex problem are now highly specialized, and it is impossible even
for the most versatile person to be at home in all these
specialities. Thus the author disclaims all competence in the field
of ethnology, and in the chapter devoted to the evolution of the
forms of marriage he avowedly follows Westermarck. He could not
choose a better guide; but, as Dr. Westermarck would be the first
to admit, the History of Marriage was written some years
ago, and needs to be considerably re-written in the light of many
important contributions to knowledge which have appeared since. In
any case, a mere summary of another man's work is somewhat out of
place in a book like Die Sexuelle Frage, which relies so
much on its author's vigorous intellectual independence. Dr. Forel
shows his independence in his attitude towards other writers on the
same subject. He explains at the outset that he makes no reference
to the work of others in this field, but is only concerned to set
forth his own results. This attitude, however, he is unable to
maintain, and it thus happens that while some authors receive an
exaggerated amount of attention in his pages, others of at least
equal importance are not so much as mentioned.

It is certainly in the independent personality of the author,
and in his wide and mature outlook on life, that the value and
interest of the book mainly lie. While it is scientific intone and
temper, it can scarcely be said to bring forward any really novel
contribution to scientific knowledge. The sociological section
seems the most fundamental part of the book, and the author puts
forward many striking and courageous suggestions in matters of
social reform, more especially with reference to the influence
which the growing sense of the importance of heredity and of the
future of the race should exert on actual practice. Thus he does
not hesitate to suggest that when a wife is sterile it should be
possible for the husband, without the dissolution of the marriage,
to form another recognized relationship; and he likewise argues
that a healthy woman should be free to become a mother, even
outside marriage, should she so desire. He wishes to confer on
women many rights and privileges which they do not now possess; the
wife should be recognized as supreme as the man, her right to the
children should always be regarded as stronger than the father's,
and the children should take the mother's name. The author is an
uncompromising champion of neo-Malthusian methods, though by no
means opposed to large families where the parents are able to breed
and bring up healthy children. He is a fierce antagonist of
alcohol, from its influence on heredity, and he denounces the money
basis of sexual relationships, not only in prostitution but in
marriage, as a potent cause of the deterioration of the race. Many
of his proposals, it will be seen, are likely to arouse not merely
doubt, but very decided dissent. It is, however, impossible not to
recognize that the book is the work of a vigorously intellectual,
courageous, and practical physician who desires reforms which are
by no means always so rash and hasty as a bald statement of them
may suggest. He looks forward to no Utopia, and expects that in the
future, as in the present, human passion and human meanness will
still continue to be manifested. He believes, nevertheless, that a
day will come when much that now flourishes almost unquestioned
will be looked back upon in the same spirit as we look back on the
burning of witches, the doings of the Inquisition, and the
instruments of torture preserved in our museums. In so far as we
have aided to bring about that time our children's children will
weave a wreath in our honour, "though they will wonder how it is
they sprang from such a barbarous stock, and have to count so many
drunkards, criminals, and blockheads among their ancestors."

XXI. INSANITY AND THE LAW

This article, suggested by the trial of Harry Thaw for
murder, a famous case of that day, appeared in the DAILY DISPATCH
for February 20th, 1907.

IT is seldom that we see the defects of our judicial methods so
vividly illustrated as by the trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of
Stanford White, now proceeding in New York. The illustration is all
the more effective because of the extraordinary contrast between
the conspicuous position which this forensic drama occupies in the
eyes of the whole English-speaking world, and the unimportant
bearing of the issue on the interests of that world.

Even as a drama it lacks interest; there are no leading facts in
dispute, no fascinating mystery to be probed, no spotless victim
whose wrongs can be redressed. The simple question merely is
whether a highly excitable and neurotic man, who has adopted an
anti-social method of avenging a private grievance, should, on the
one hand, be executed or, at least, imprisoned; or, on the other,
be placed in a lunatic asylum, or, at least, a sanatorium. It makes
very little difference to New York or the world which alternative
is adopted, But observe how this simple problem is met. In the
first place, the murderer himself, his friends, his legal advisers,
and the uninvited public generally are allowed to discuss and
decide—quite independently of the prisoner's real mental
condition—which of these alternatives they desire to accept.
The facts being indisputable, they naturally choose the plea of
insanity; if they had not done so we should have heard nothing of
any insanity, however real its existence.

Then a jury must be brought together, and this, even in one of
the largest cities in the world, is a long and difficult matter,
for both sides have to be pleased, and to have read about the case,
or casually expressed an opinion on it, is a disqualification for
the jury box. A whole day is needed to select two jurors, who may
perhaps, be dismissed the day after as ineligible. A due amount of
public time and money having thus been expended, the expert
witnesses must be brought forward to prove the insanity.

In the legal sense "insanity," being based on the science of a
century ago, involves a very complete degree of mental
disintegration, and expert witnesses for the defence in cases of
this kind are usually expected to assert, and are sometimes
badgered into asserting, that the prisoner at the time of the
offence was unable to know the nature and quality of his deed.

One, at least, of these ex-parte experts in the present
case seems to have illustrated in a lamentably clear manner the
weakness such evidence may reveal when a medical witness who, if
left to himself, might probably have formed a sensible opinion, is
forced, in the hands of a clever counsel well primed with methods
of medical diagnosis, to confess ignorance of the technical details
of his own profession, and to contradict his own chief
statements.

The evidence in the case has, however, to be pushed beyond this
more or less scientific aspect, and the past history of the parties
concerned is diligently raked up and brought, clearly or dimly,
into the glare of day, while the young girl who was the motive of
the deed is forced to confess, into the ears of the whole world,
the vulgar details of her own seduction.

At this point the judge intervenes to introduce a new aspect
into the case, and excludes ladies from the court, much to their
indignation, for as the whole case revolves round a woman they
imagined—and not unreasonably—that it concerned women
at least as much as men. But two hundred reporters (including lady
reporters) are still left in court, and these amply vindicate the
rights of the excluded public. The newspapers of America are filled
with details of a nature, we are told, unprecedented even in
American journalism.

Having secured the details they craved, the public thereupon
proceeds to trample on those who have ministered to its needs. The
Postmaster-General who, in the United States, is the supreme censor
of all literature, against whom there is no appeal, is set in
motion; mass meetings are called even in remote parts of the
country; the clergy in the pulpits are requisitioned, not to warn
their flocks of the dangers of entering the paths of sin, but to
denounce the awful iniquity of too explicitly referring to those
paths in print. And so it is, that by the co-operation of all
persons and parties concerned or unconcerned in the question, a
colossal, many-headed, and world-wide scandal is manufactured out
of the simple and unimportant problem: Shall Harry Thaw be placed
in a prison or a sanatorium?

If the Thaw trial had been invented by a clever advocate for the
reform of judicial procedure it could scarcely have brought
together in a more felicitous manner the glaring incongruities of
our judicial system from a modern standpoint. The reductio ad
absurdum is all the more convincing because it is quite free
from the element of "miscarriage of justice" which always appeals
so powerfully to popular sympathy; the question of procedure is
supreme.

It must be borne in mind that, however American the details of
the case may be, the American system of administering justice is
substantially the English system, magnified in its various
proportions by an enterprising, progressive, and emotional people.
It is this magnification which makes the trial so instructive to us
in England. The old English communities who devised our system
found it adequate to their simple needs; they were not worried by
technical and psychological problems, nor battered by waves of
emotion proceeding from millions of their fellow-creatures. But the
system that answered their needs is scarcely adequate to the
conditions of a more complex civilisation, and the old machine
creaks ominously when subjected to strains it was never meant to
bear.

When a man chooses to avenge his real or fancied grievances by
shooting his enemy at sight he is clearly acting in a lawless and
anti-social manner. Whether we decide that he is sane or
insane—and the dividing line is often difficult to
draw—he is not fit to be at large. In such a case, under
modern conditions, the ancient dilemma, "Guilty, or Not Guilty?"
has no such thrilling and tragic import as it once possessed.

We are slowly reaching the conclusion that fundamentally there
is but a slight difference between criminals and the insane; that
our prisons and our asylums must alike become places in which
certain abnormal people are confined in their own interests and
those of society; not for punishment, but for treatment. Thus from
the modern standpoint the alternative of prison or asylum, of
"Guilty" or "Not Guilty," is becoming if not exactly an alternative
of tweedledum and tweedledee, at all events, a matter which need
not arouse the passionate interest of the multitude.

It by no means follows that the expert will have to be
abolished. On the contrary, the very fact that the barriers between
the great classes of "criminals" and "lunatics" are falling away
makes it all the more essential to determine the precise
psychological characteristics of each individual, and the treatment
to which he should be subjected. This cannot be done by allowing
experts to become the tools of contending parties. The function of
the expert must be made subordinate to the judicial function.
Doctors proverbially differ, but if we had a body of approved
experts (at present anyone may pose as an expert) reporting
directly to the judge or judges (for there should be more than one
judge in serious criminal cases), or acting as assessors under
their direction, we should have a solid, accurate, and powerful
instrument on the side of justice and humanity, and the dignity and
credit of our law courts would be placed on a higher level.

The practical realisation of modern conditions in these matters
will have an indirect bearing on that question of publicity which
has aroused so much feeling in regard to the Thaw trial. The
freedom of the Press is a precious possession, and any attack on
that freedom is jealously and rightly resented. But there is
ceasing to be any good reason why the problem whether a high strung
and morbid man is to be placed in a prison or an asylum need arouse
the curiosity of millions as to every detail of his life. Such
unwholesome and unreasonable curiosity is merely the outcome of our
theatrical and antiquated forensic methods, and will die out as
they are reformed.

To sum up: If our judicial methods are to be brought into line
with modern knowledge and modern social standards, we need to
strengthen the judicial, and reduce the forensic element in our
courts. Counsel will probably tend to be diminished in number, and
judges to be increased. The jury, in cases where something more
than common sense and common knowledge of the world are demanded,
will tend to play a more subordinate part, and experts, carefully
chosen and removed from the position of partisans, will play a
larger part. There is no reason why our law courts should be made
cheap substitutes for the theatre and the circus, or even the prize
ring.

The entertainment they may thus supply is unsatisfactory at
best, and a little too dearly bought. The public energy and public
emotion here expended will be free to be transferred to other
problems now beginning to shape themselves to the twentieth
century, problems of infinitely greater concern to the present and
coming generations, and quite as fascinating as those presented in
the law courts.

Whatever scandal it may have caused, the Thaw trial will not be
without its uses if it helps us further along the road of judicial
reform.

XXII. LETTER TO A
SUFFRAGETTE

This letter was addressed to Miss Mary Gawthorpe on September
18th, 1912, but I doubt if it has been printed.

DEAR MADAM, I AM in receipt of your letter appealing for
sympathy on behalf of Mrs. —— and Miss ——.
As one who has for over twenty-five years been an avowed advocate
not only of woman's suffrage but of the complete social equality of
men and women, I hold strong views regarding the attempt to arouse
public sympathy on behalf of Mrs. —— and Miss
—— and thus to identify what I regard as a noble cause
with vulgar criminality. It may well be that these ladies are
persons of more than average high personal character. But the
general public is not concerned with their private character but
with their public actions. Law makes some rough attempt to
distinguish the responsible offender from the irresponsible
offender. But it is far too crude an instrument to distinguish
motives. Why should it? An act does not become less criminal, less
anti-social, less dangerous because the motives behind it happened
to be good. Apart from such general considerations, there are more
specific reasons why any clear-headed person—whether or not
resenting the attempt of Mrs. —— and Miss
—— to drag a good cause into the mud—should
refuse to sign the proposed petition.

In the first place, random incendiarism is not a political
crime, and has never been so regarded, any more than burglary, even
when the burglar claims to be politically an anarchist. To rank
such crimes among political offences would be disastrous, for there
would no longer be any general sympathy with political offenders
and it would soon become impossible to claim any special privilege
even for legitimate political offenders.

In the second place, it is difficult to see how any objection
can be raised to the severity of the sentence. If the prisoners
were so densely ignorant, so feeble-minded, that their sanity were
questionable there would be good ground for a revision of the
sentence. But to claim that the prisoners are educated, sane,
intelligent, and responsible, is surely to assert by implication
that they are fit subjects for the heaviest sentence that may
lawfully be imposed.

There remains the question of forcible feeding. Here you have a
very strong point. Forcible feeding, there can be no doubt, is
thoroughly objectionable and attended by serious risks. But to whom
ought the petition against forcible feeding be addressed? Certainly
not to the officials, for they are already as much opposed to
forcible feeding as you or I, but to Mrs. —— and Miss
——.

Yours faithfully,

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

XXIII. THE CARE OF THE
UNBORN

This protest against the view that the reasonable care of the
future child merely belongs to the sphere of Utopian "ideas" was
published in THE NEW AGE for April 11th, 1908. The movement I
championed is now, a quarter of a century later, justified by the
fact that the importance of such problems has become generally
recognised, and even to a considerable extent embodied in practice.
In Soviet Russia, and now in Spain, the "illegitimate" child has
been abolished, institutions, often more or less under state or
municipal control, are set up in various countries of the New World
and the Old to aid the prospective as well as the actual mother!
while the increasing recognition of contraception and sterilisation
places in the hands of the intelligent population a practical
instrument of selective breeding. I would like now to add that my
paper on "Eugenics and St. Valentine," here mentioned and later
included in THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE, encouraged Sir Francis
Gallon, as he told me, to push on his eugenic proposals, and that
it was at my suggestion that he agreed to the popular edition of
his INQUIRIES in Everyman's Library.

IN his "Open Letter" (New Age, March 7th) Mr. Eden
Phillpotts asks why we should not have a state Department for the
Unborn. The Department, he suggests, would be entirely devoted to
the interests of the next generation; it would have nothing to say
concerning marriage, but as soon as men and women set about
becoming mothers and fathers they would have to reckon with this
Department. They would repair here as they repair to a life
insurance office; they would find the best scientific and
sociological knowledge of the time; their personal and hereditary
qualities would be investigated, and they would be informed whether
the child of their union would be likely to raise the level of
Man—if not help on the Superman—or whether in
deliberately bringing a child into the world they might not be
committing as grave a crime as if they had deliberately put a child
out of the world.

Mr. Phillpotts brings forward this scheme merely as an "idea,"
the irresponsible suggestion of an artist in fiction, at the best
as a new plank for a Utopian platform resting on the air. I hoped
that someone would come forward to protest. As no better qualified
person has done so, I trust I may be allowed to point out that
selective control in the breeding of the future generaton is a
proposal which, far from resting on the air, definitely lies on our
horizon. It slowly began to take shape throughout the nineteenth
century, and during the few years of the present century the pace
of our progress towards it has been considerably accelerated.

In modern times—for it is needless to go back to the
imaginary Republic of Plato or the real Republic of
Sparta—the question of controlling the future generation, or
even of socially safeguarding the young of the present generation,
never presents itself until industrial conditions of life
predominate over agricultural conditions. In States that are
fundamentally agricultural the production of children occurs
automatically, almost involuntarily, without question or anxious
comment. There is always food for another mouth, and another "hand"
is always welcome; children are "sent by God." It is true that
often, as in Russia and Austria-Hungary to-day, they die off with
almost the same facility as they are born; but since the conditions
that kill them are to superficial observation natural conditions,
there is no obvious call for active interference.

All this is altered when agricultural life gives place to
industrial life, and a factory system takes away men and women
alike into its service, but ignores entirely the question of the
production of new men and women. Home life is then reduced to its
barest and sordidest minimum; reproduction, still left to chance,
is now carried out under actively unfavourable influences; and
children, abandoned at birth to the bottle administered by the hand
of strangers, either die with greater rapidity even than in less
prosperous agricultural communities (compare the high infantile
mortality of England with the low infantile mortality of Ireland),
or else grow up stunted, defective, nervously unstable.

That is a state of things which soon begins to attract
attention, because, unlike earlier conditions, it is quite
obviously unnatural. It was the origin of a series of more or less
inadequate measures, beginning during the Victorian period, and
still continuing, which were once described as "humanitarian,"
because they were looked upon as a sort of charity to outcasts, and
not as necessary measures of social hygiene carried out by a
community in its own interests. Thus, it is that we acquired our
farcical factory legislation, which, in order to salve wounded
humanitarian feelings, ordained, for instance, that women shall
rest for four weeks after confinement and yet provided not a penny
for their support during that period of enforced rest, the result
being that employer and employee every day tacitly conspire to
break the law and deteriorate the new generation, while the State
sanctimoniously winks. In Germany this matter of rest after
confinement is covered by the general compulsory insurance scheme.
In France a private company has even set a superb example to the
State; and at the famous Creuzot works the expectant mother not
only rests during the latter half of pregnancy, but has her salary
raised; she suckles her infant, and must produce a medical
certificate of fitness before returning to work. The results are
said to be admirable as regards both mother and infant.

The question of suckling is of primary importance from several
points of view, not least because the mortality of bottle-fed
infants is usually double that of breast-fed infants, which is why
the enterprising town of Leipzig has lately resolved to subsidize
those of its mothers who suckle their babies. In England an evil
state of things has sometimes been favoured by the well-meant
efforts of local authorities to facilitate the supply of cow's
milk. The young English working man, it has been said, nowadays
often only marries a part of a woman, the other part being in a
chemist's shop window in the shape of a glass feeding-bottle; she
not only fails to suckle her child, but she is becoming unable to
do so. Thus it is that we have to-day in England an immense
infantile mortality, which shows no real tendency to decrease
although our general mortality is decreasing, and although half of
it is admitted by the best authorities to be easily preventible. It
is a problem we are beginning to grow alive to, as is shown by the
recent National Conference on Infant Mortality, as well as by the
excellent Schools for Mothers now springing up among us, mainly
suggested by the "Consultations de Nourissons" founded by Budin in
Paris in 1892.

It is not enough, however, to realize the risks of the child
after birth; the problem is soon pushed farther back, and we
understand that it is just as necessary to watch over the child
before birth, for while it is still in its mother's womb its fate
may be determined. Here we in England have as yet done nothing. We
may say in the words of Bouchacourt that among us "the dregs of the
human species—the blind, the deaf-mute, the degenerate, the
imbecile, the epileptic—are better protected than pregnant
women." It is from France that the finest inspirations and
initiations come. To Budin, who lately died, and Pinard who are
among the chief pioneers of human progress in our time, we owe not
only a more systematic care for the infant, but the inception of
the new movement for the care of the unborn child and a precise
knowledge of the reasons which make that necessary. Masses of data
have now come into existence showing that it is only by resting
during the later months of pregnancy that a woman can produce a
fully-developed child, and that without such rest confinement tends
to occur prematurely, such prematurity being the chief cause of the
enormous infantile mortality. In England, it is stated by
Ballantyne, the greatest British authority, that 20 to over 40 per
cent, of all children born are premature, the estimate varying
according to the standard of maturity adopted. In France there is
now an active demand for the State recognition of this need of rest
during the last three months or, at the very least, four weeks, of
pregnancy, and during the past twenty years also a number of
excellently managed municipal Asiles have been established
in which pregnant women—married and unmarried on a footing of
complete equality—may secure this necessary rest, while
movements are also on foot to furnish advice to pregnant women at
home and to relieve them in their household work. One little spot
in France—Villiers-le-Duc—has acquired an almost
classic fame. In this village of the Cote d'Or any woman may claim
support during pregnancy, as well as the gratuitous services of
doctor and midwife, the result being that both infant and maternal
mortality have been almost abolished. In England we are too
"practical" for so thorough a recognition as this of the fact that
prevention is better than cure. Yet Villiers-le-Duc has been a
source of inspiration even for England, for here it was that Mr.
Broad-bent, the Mayor of Huddersfield, came and resolved to
establish what has since become generally known as the Huddersfield
system, the basis of the Notification of Births Act which came into
force this year. That Act, with all its imperfections and its
merely permissive character, is yet I the most important event
which has happened in this country for a long time past. It
represents the recognition of the fact that the infant, even from
the moment of birth, must be the object of the State's care, and
that recognition cannot fail to be very fruitful in
consequences.

The care for the child, however, the recognition of the infant,
the demand of rest for the pregnant and suckling woman—these
are steps which, so far from covering all the ground, only seem to
lead us slowly but surely back to the yet more fundamental question
of conception. A wise care for the welfare of the products of
conception leads to care in the causation of conception. That,
indeed, is a step that began to be taken a very long time back, and
it is idle now for American Presidents or English Bishops to
discuss whether it is good or bad. It will be time to discuss the
wisdom of increasing our diminished output of babies when we have
learnt how to deal with those we have. It is quite certain that the
limitation of offspring—voluntary or involuntary—has
always been bound up with all human progress; indeed, one may say
with all zoological progress. The higher the organism the lower the
offspring.

But to be on a sound basis, human or zoological, the progeny
diminished in quantity must be increased in quality. Unfortunately,
that is not what is happening with our own diminished output of
babies. On the contrary, the quality has diminished as much as the
quantity. That was inevitable, for the decrease has not been caused
by any deliberate selection of the best parents or the best
conditions for parenthood, but has rather been effected by the
restraint of the better elements in the community.

It has thus happened that along a number of lines—in
England, in France, in Germany—attention is being more and
more directed to that great central problem of human race-building:
How can we compensate the inevitably diminished quantity of babies
by raising their quality? Mr. Philipotts is by no means alone in
asking why it is that, though even savages carefully weed their
gardens, we not only tolerate our weeds, but even put them under
glass.

In 1883 Francis Galton—who, as befits one who devoted
himself to the interests of future generations, is still alive and
active among us, the sole survivor of the intellectual giants of
his time—put forward a book entitled Inquiries into Human
Faculty and Its Development, in which, summarising his own
earlier investigations, he dealt with "various topics more or less
connected with that of the cultivation of the race, or, as we might
call it, with 'eugenic' questions—that is, with questions
bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes, good in stock,
hereditarily endowed with noble qualities."*

[* This book has lately been reprinted in the
invaluable "Everyman's Library."]

For some years eugenics was generally regarded less as a subject
of supreme social importance than as a butt for witticism; at the
best it seemed an amiable scientific fad. That is no longer the
case. To-day Galton's work is the recognised starting-point of a
new movement in favour of Nalional Eugenics; elaborale scienlific
invesligations are being carried on in order to enlarge our
defective knowledge of the laws of heredity; ihe University of
London officially recognises ihe subject of eugenics, and ihe
versalile Professor Karl Pearson is at the head of a laboratory for
exploring that great field of Biometrics which is definitely based
on ihe life-work of Galton. During ihe past few weeks, also, the
Eugenics Education Sociely has been established wilh ihe double
object of increasing popular knowledge and interest in this field
and of promoting the ends which make for the better breeding of the
race.

At the same time there has been of recent years a real change of
attitude towards this question on the part of the general public.
As Dr. Clouston, the distinguished Edinburgh alienist, lately
remarked, nowadays people not only ask medical advice about
marriage and procreation, but they even follow it, and many
physicians can bear similar testimony. When any reasonable
exposition of eugenic principles is now put forward it is received
not with amusement, but with serious and sympathetic attention.* We
are all agreed now that it is necessary, as Mr. Phillpotts puts it,
to "turn off the bad blood at the meter," and the only question is
as to how that may best be effected. Greater technical knowledge
is, for one thing, needed, but also a higher general standard of
individual responsibility, for it is idle yet, and altogether
premature, to clamour for compulsion. In educating the community,
as by helping on the existing movements for the realisation of
eugenic ideals, all may assist to bring us nearer to that conscious
care for the race which Mr. Gallon believes will be the religion of
the future.

[* I recall, for instance, the comments aroused
in the Press by an article of my own on "Eugenics and St.
Valentine," published in the Nineteenth Century two years ago.]

What I have here sought to show is that Mr. Phillpotts' scheme
is not an idea in the air which may be discussed in a merely
academical fashion. It is the inevitable outcome of a movement
which, on the social as well as on the scientific side, has been
slowly prepared during a hundred years. It is not indeed the
immediately next step. We have first to grapple more closely with
the problem of the neglected infant and the ignorant and overworked
pregnant and suckling woman, for it is idle to spend care on good
breeding if the results of our care are to be flung to destruction
at or before birth. But when that problem is solved, the eugenical
problem is immediately upon us. We may help its progress; we cannot
stop it, though we may hinder it. We hinder it when we fritter away
so much time and energy in chattering about the education of
children and about what religion they shall be taught. Let them be
taught the religion of the Bantu or the Eskimo, of New Guinea or of
Central Brazil, whatever it is we may be reasonably sure they will
be usually sickened of it for life. Education has been put at the
beginning, when it ought to liave been put at the end. It matters
comparatively little what sort of education we give children; the
primary matter is what sort of children we have got to educate.
That is the most fundamental of questions. It lies deeper even than
the great question of Socialism versus Individualism, and indeed
touches a foundation that is common to both. The best organised
social system is only a house of cards if it cannot be constructed
with sound individuals, and no individualism worth the name is
possible unless a sound social organisation permits the breeding of
individuals who count. On this plane Socialism and Individualism
move in the same circle.

XXIV. BLASCO IBANEZ

This essay appeared in the NEW STATESMAN for May 30th 1914.
As will be seen, I felt that the novelist's work was losing its
original fine quality; from that date I ceased to take an interest
in it, however fit it may have been for the international popular
audience it was gaining. The literary disparagement of Blasco
Ibanez has indeed been widespread and carried much too far, since
it has led to a neglect of his early work. Moreover, whatever may
be said of him as an artist, he remains a splendid representative
of the Spanish spirit, and so fearless a champion of the Revolution
he was not destined to see, that he was compelled to spend the last
years of his life outside his own country. Now that his ideals have
been realised, his memory will doubtless receive, in Spain at all
events, the honour due to him.

IT is only recently that the novels, even the name, of Blasco
Ibanez became known to English readers. A few years ago the list
was long of his translated books in more than half a dozen
languages, not one of them in English. Now that The Cathedral,
Sonnica, The Blood of the Arena, have been published in England
and America, and that other translations are announced, it can no
longer be said that the best known and the most typically Spanish
novelist of to-day is only unknown to English readers.

Even the reader of these translations, however.—well as
they are executed—may easily receive an inadequate idea of
the scope and nature of this novelist's work. An author's latest
works, usually the first to be translated, are not always the
finest examples of his quality. Moreover, every novelist who is
marked by vital exuberance must be considered to some extent in the
mass before he can be appreciated. Blasco Ibanez has published
nearly twenty volumes in twenty years, and it is necessary to take
a survey of many of these to gain a fair notion of his quality and
position. He began as a regional novelist with stories of the
tragic and laborious life of the Valencian peasantry among whom he
had lived from childhood. Arroz y Tartana, Entre Naranjos, Canas
y Barro, Flor de Maya, La Barraca—none of them published
in English—belong to this group. These books are vivid and
pungent; they spring naturally out of the writer's experience; they
describe persons evidently studied from life and they bring before
us in detail a peculiar picture of rural life. They perhaps remain
the best books Blasco Ibanez has written. The vision is narrower
than in any of his later books, but its depths and the richness of
the sympathy behind it gives them universal interest. One may
refer, for instance, to La Barraca, published in 1898. This
is not only, as it has been called, the finest masterpiece among
Spanish regional novels. The struggle of man with the soil, the
devotion of the peasant to that soil, the tragic contest between
the tenant and the landlord, have never, probably, been so
vehemently and poignantly presented in any literature. As a
contrast to the monotonous intensity of La Barraca may be
placed Canas y Barro, published four years later, a picture
of life in the malarious rice-fields of the Valencian Lake
Albufera, and of the varied types to be found among the workers in
this region.

By 1903 Blasco Ibanez had established his fame as a novelist and
at the same time exhausted his personal impressions of Valencia. He
now sought to give expression to his spirit of social revolt by
studying special aspects of life in Spain generally. We thus have
what are termed the "novels of rebellion," including La
Catedral, La Bodega and La Horda, all fighting books,
manuals of revolutionary propaganda rather than serene works of
art.

La Catedral, in which a struggle between the renovating
spirit of modern anarchism and the decaying spirit of conservatism
is played out in the cloisters of Toledo Cathedral, is the most
translated of all the novelist's books and the first to appear in
English, but it is perhaps the least satisfactory. That at all
events is its author's opinion; it is too heavy, he confided to a
friend, and there is too much doctrine. It is difficult to dispute
this verdict. La Bodega, a book of similar method, may be
regarded as a better example of this group; it presents a vivid
picture of the wine industry at Jerez and the invasion into this
sphere of the modern labour spirit; the Anarchist Salvoechea is
here introduced under a pseudonym as a kind of modern Christ. In
El Intruso, which has as its background the iron mines and
manu-facturies of Bilbao, another and more modern phase of Spanish
religion is brought forward and the power of the Jesuit set forth.
Finally, La Horda, the last novel of this group, deals with
the parish life of the slums of Madrid.

The later novels of Blasco Ibanez, beginning with La Maja
Desnuda in 1906, are freer and more varied in character; they
are more deliberately analytical and psychological than the books
of the first period, more artistically impartial than those of the
second class. The novelist has become more agile and more
self-conscious, to some of us, perhaps, less interesting. In most
of these books the author chooses a special panorama and a definite
theme which he analyses disinterestedly and indeed often admirably.
Thus we have Sangre y Arena in which bull-fighting is
presented as a problem in the national life of Spain. Again, we
have Los Muertos Mandan (shortly to be published as The
Tyranny of the Ancestors), in which, on the background of
the lovely Balearic Islands, is presented the great question of
tradition, the iron rule of the dead over the living. It is
doubtless one of the most vivid and masterly of the novelist's
works. Recently Blasco Ibanez, a great traveller, has been visiting
South America and studying the new aspects of life there presented.
They form the subject of his most recent books.

II

The man behind these books is no ordinary man of letters. He is
a personality, and that fact it is which imparts so much more
interest to his work than its purely literary
qualities—though these are not negligible—would
warrant. The abounding vitality and energy of the books is, we
feel, a reflection of the aboundingly vital and energetic person
behind them.

Vicente Blasco Ibanez was born in Valencia in 1867 of parents
who kept a modest provision-shop. More remotely the family sprang
from Aragon, and it is certainly the bold, obstinate, firm-fibred
Celtiberian stock of that region which we feel predominantly in
this man's work. The young Vicente was a turbulent youth,
intelligent but rebellious to discipline, and more fond of sport
than of books. He began life as a law student and speedily acquired
a profound distaste for law and for lawyers, whom he regards as
among the chief agents of social evil. At seventeen he finally
abandoned the law, and ran away to Madrid, to become a journalist.
A year later he wrote a revolutionary sonnet against the Government
and for this offence was sent to prison for six months. Such
treatment was not calculated to exert a soothing influence on a
youth of Vicente's temper. The next years were full of agitation,
of republican propaganda, and of conflicts with law and authority.
In 1890, having been condemned to prison for speeches and agitation
against the Conservative Government of the day, Blasco thought it
best to flee to Paris, about which he wrote a book. A few years
later he again fled, hurriedly, in a fisherman's boat, to Italy, on
account of a collision between the people and the police in the
agitation over the Cuban war. On his too reckless return he was
seized by the police, handcuffed, and taken to Barcelona, then
under martial law, and condemned by the Council of War to a convict
prison. The tribunal neglected, however, to deprive him of civil
rights, and in a few months—to the astonishment of all
Spain—the city of Valencia, which he had done so much to
transform into a great revolutionary centre, liberated him from
prison by sending him to Parliament as their deputy. As a
counterblast to this anti-clerical declaration, the clergy resolved
on a demonstration at Valencia by choosing that port for the
embarcation of a national pilgrimage to Rome. The pilgrims duly
arrived at the quays under the superintendence of ten bishops, but
Blasco Ibanez and a few faithful followers were prepared, and to
the horror of the faithful he ordered the ten prelates to be flung
into the sea, whence they were speedily and safely rescued in small
boats which the revolutionary leader (this is a characteristically
Spanish trait) had humanely placed in readiness. Such at least is
the recorded story.

At this time Blasco Ibanez was approaching the age of thirty and
was yet scarcely known as a novelist. As a youth he had indeed
published a story of wild adventure, which he afterwards bought up
and destroyed. He reached the novel indirectly, through journalism.
As a deputy he desired to spread his ideas through Spain, and
therefore founded a newspaper, El Pueblo, into which he threw so
much energy that it rapidly acquired wide influence. A
feuilleton was, however, indispensable, and as there was no
capital wherewith to pay a novelist, the editor resolved to write
his own feuilleton. It was in this way that all the earlier
novels—the group of vivid pictures of Valencian life based on
early personal impressions—first appeared, attracting little
attention even when published separately until the French
discovered and translated La Barraca under the title of
Terres Maudites. Soon afterwards Blasco Ibanez had become a
famous novelist whose reputation was growing world-wide. He was
henceforth content to devote his energies exclusively to the work
of novel-writing.

How immense this man's energies are may be sufficiently divined
even from this brief sketch of his early life. We may see him
characteristically in the full-length portrait (exhibited in London
a few years ago) by another famous Valencian, Sorolla, whose work,
in a different medium, has so much of the same quality as his
friend the novelist's. Here we see Blasco Ibanez in the full vigour
of maturity. He stands facing the spectator with a cigarette
between his fingers, a grizzled, solid figure with high receding
domed forehead, slight beard and moustache, a strong, sagacious
man, assured of his power, who is taking your measure, calmly,
critically, self-confidently, with a jovial, humorous smile. He is,
you perceive, a man planted firmly on the earth, with a close grip
of the material things of life, a man of great appetites to match
his great energies. We may miss here any delicate sense of the
spiritual refinements of life or the subtleties of the soul. But we
are unmistakably aware of a man with a very vivid sense of
humanity, with a powerful aptitude for human adventure, human
passion, human justice, even human idealism. That is Blasco
Ibanez.

III

Blasco Ibanez has sometimes been called the Spanish Zola. It is
certain that the French novelist has influenced the later
development of the Spanish novelist and that in general methods of
approaching their art there are points of resemblance between the
two writers. Yet the differences are fundamental. Zola was a man of
the study who made novel-writing his life-work from the outset; for
every book he patiently accumulated immense masses of notes (in
which, as he himself admitted, he sometimes lost himself), and in a
business-like and methodical manner he wove those notes into books
of uniform and often impressive pattern, which becomes the more
impressive because it was inspired by a novel doctrine of
scientific realism. Nothing of this in the Spanish writer. However
revolutionary his social and political outlook may be, he is not
revolutionary in methods of art; he has scarcely even mastered the
traditional methods; the habits of journalism have taken strong
hold of him and his more severe Spanish critics deplore the
frequent looseness and inaccuracy of his style. There are passages
of splendid lyrical rhapsody, and there are often the marks of a
fine and bold artist in the construction of a story or the
presentation of a character, but in the accomplished use of the
beautiful Castilian tongue Blasco Ibanez is surpassed by many a
young Spanish writer of to-day. Nor has he any of Zola's methodical
fervour of laborious documentation. In his early novels he adopted
the happy method of drawing on his own vivid early memories of
Valencian life and character. More recently his method has been to
soak hmiself, swiftly and completely but for the most part very
briefly, in the life he proposes to depict. A week may suffice for
this, and the novel itself may be written in a couple of months.
Thus for writing Sangre y Arena it sufficed him to visit
Seville in the company of a famous matador, and the preparation for
Los Muertos Mandan was a boating expedition round the
Balearic coast, in the course of which he was overtaken by a storm,
and forced to shelter on an islet where he remained for fourteen
hours without food and soaked to the skin. Nor are the notes for
his books written down; he relies exclusively on his prodigious
memory and his intense power of visualizing everything that
impresses him. His robust and impatient temperament enables him to
work at very high pressure, oblivious of every attempt to interrupt
him, even for eighteen hours at a stretch, sometimes singing as he
writes, for he is a passionate melomaniac whose idols are Beethoven
and Wagner. It is clear that a worker with such methods has little
need of sleep; he is, however, a great eater, and feels, indeed,
Zamacois tells us, a great contempt for people who cannot eat well;
but when he is approaching the end of a novel all such physical
needs are disregarded; he writes on feverishly, almost in a state
of somnambulism, even, if need be, for thirty hours, until the book
is completed, when it is perhaps sent to the printers unread, to be
corrected in proof.

Such is the figure behind these powerful and impetuous books
which have made so much noise in the world. It is the figure of a
typical representative of the Spanish spirit, which has sometimes
shown itself more refined and distinguished, but is ever of very
firm fibre, of well-tempered individuality. And these books are not
merely faint reflections of the man who has so carelessly flung
them at the world; they are the most interesting documents we can
easily find to throw light on the social and industrial questions
which are stirring Spain to-day.

XXV. THE INTERMEDIATE TYPES
AMONG PRIMITIVE FOLK

The following review of Edward Carpenter's book of this name
appeared in the OCCULT REVIEW in 1914.

IN a previous book, The Intermediate Sex, Mr. Edward
Carpenter set forth the claim for recognition of persons of
homosexual and bisexual constitution, as entitled to a fitting
place and sphere of usefulness in the general scheme of society. It
cannot be said that such a plea is without justification, for
careful investigation in various countries has shown that nearly
everywhere homosexual persons constitute over 1 per cent, of the
population, and bisexual persons at least 4 per cent.; so that in
our own country alone the number of persons of this type probably
run into millions. Moreover, they are found in all social and
intellectual classes, not only in the lowest, but also in the
highest.

In the present volume Mr. Carpenter takes up a special aspect of
the same subject, and deals with it in detail, which was not
possible in the more comprehensive earlier book. He seeks to
investigate the part played in religion and in warfare by the
"Intermediate" types of "Primitive" days.

A verbal criticism intrudes itself, indeed, as the author
himself admits, at the outset. The vague term "Intermediate," while
it may fairly be applied to many sexual inverts, will not
satisfactorily cover them all, for not all male inverts approximate
to the feminine type, nor all female inverts to the masculine; some
even, Carpenter himself remarks, might be termed "super-virile" and
"ultra-feminine." The generally accepted term "homosexual,"
although not altogether unobjectionable, seems more definite,
accurate, and comprehensive than "intermediate." In a similar
manner it may be said that the term "primitive" cannot be applied
to any races'known to history, or even to ethnography, and least of
all to the Greeks and Japanese, who are dealt with at length in the
present volume.

Such criticism, which is fairly obvious, cannot, however, affect
the substance of the book. It falls into two parts: "The
Intermediate in the Service of Religion" and "The Intermediate as
Warrior." The subject of the second part may be regarded as the
more familiar. It is fairly well known that military comradeship on
a homosexual basis existed among the Greeks, and was regarded as a
stimulus to warlike prowess. That similar attachments existed among
the Japanese Samurai warriors is less well known. Both these
manifestations of military comradeship are here luminously
discussed. An interesting chapter is devoted to Dorian comradeship
in relation to the status of women. It has frequently been asserted
that Greek paiderastia was connected, whether as cause or
effect, with the inferior status of women in Greece. There is no
question that during a considerable period the position of women in
Greece was by no means high. But Carpenter well shows that there
was no parallelism between the high estimation of "manly love" and
the low estimation of women. Thus it was in Sparta that
paiderastia was most practised and esteemed, and it was in
Sparta that women enjoyed most power and freedom, and were least
shut apart from the men by custom.

It is in the first part of this book, however—the
discussion of homosexuality in the service of religion—that
most readers will find novelty. Elie Reclus, indeed, in his
sympathetic and penetrating study of savage life, Primitive
Folk, had realized this function of abnormal sexuality in early
culture, and it has been further developed by later writers
(notably Horneffer in his work on priesthood, not referred to in
the book before us), but the connection still seems to most people
somewhat of a paradox. It is frequently regarded as, at most, a
piece of superstition. Edward Carpenter argues, however, that there
really is an organic connection between the homosexual temperament
and unusual psychic or divinatory powers, and that this connection
is exaggerated in popular view by the fact that ideas of sorcery
and witchcraft become especially associated with the ceremonials of
an old religion which is being superseded by a new religion. There
are four ways in which the homosexual man or woman tends to become
a force in primitive culture: (1) not being a complete man or a
complete woman, the invert is impelled to create a new sphere of
activity; (2) being different from others, and sometimes an object
of contempt, sometimes of admiration, his mind is turned in on
himself, and he is forced to think; (3) frequently combining
masculine and feminine qualities, he would sometimes be greatly
superior in ability to the rest of the tribe; (4) the blending of
the masculine and feminine temperaments would sometimes produce
persons whose perceptions were so subtle, complex, and rapid that
they would be diviners and prophets in a very real sense, and
acquire a strange reputation for sanctity and divinity. These four
processes seem to run into each other, but the general outcome is
that in primitive culture "variations of sex-temperament from the
normal have not been negligible freaks, but have played an
important part in the evolution and expansion of human
society."

These are some of the topics discussed by the light of the most
recent literature in Mr. Edward Carpenter's volume. It is a
valuable contribution to the solution of an interesting
problem.

XXVI. THE HISTORY OF THE
PSYCHO-ANALYTIC MOVEMENT

This epitome of Freud's important essay "Zur Geschichte der
Psychoanalytischen Bewegung," JAHRBUCH DER PSYCHOANALYSE, 1914,
appeared in the JOURNAL OF MENTAL SCIENCE for January, 1915.
Freud's essay later appeared in the English translation of his
COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. I.

IN the psycho-analytic movement history has been made rapidly,
and amid the various revolutionary currents it must be difficult
even for the prime leader himself to know exactly where the
movement stands. In this characteristic and interesting paper he
seeks to show where he himself stands. He imparts an
autobiographical value to the narrative by carrying it back to the
days of his early medical life in Paris. He had become a doctor
unwillingly, but was anxious to benefit neurotic patients, and
thought that this could be done by the exclusively physical method
of electro-therapy. He records how, at one of Charcot's evening
receptions, he heard the honoured master narrating to Brouardel the
serious sufferings of a young wife with an impotent husband;
Brouardel seemed to express doubts as to the causation of the
troubles, and Charcot broke in with vivacity: "Mais dans des cas
pareils c'est toujours la chose genitale,
toujours—toujours—toujours." Freud felt surprised, and
at the same wondered that if this was Charcot's opinion he could
yet occupy himself exclusively with anatomical considerations. But
Freud at the time, he tells us, was, in the aetiology of neurosis,
"as innocent and ignorant as any hopeful academic"; and when a
little later he began practice in Vienna, and Chrobak, a
propos of exactly such a case as Charcot had narrated, told him
that, though it could not be given, the best prescription was: "Rx
penis normalis dosim repetatur," he was shocked at the Professor's
cynicism.

The doctrine of suppression and resistance was one of the first
elements of psycho-analysis to become clear to Freud, and he
regarded it as an original discovery until he found it set forth by
Schopenhauer; "it is the foundation stone on which the edifice of
psycho-analysis rests." That theory, he declares, is an attempt to
make intelligible two manifestations always found when we seek to
trace neurotic symptoms to their source: the fact of transference
and that of resistance. "All investigation which recognises these
two facts and makes them the point of departure is psychoanalysis,
even when it leads to other results than mine." He strongly
objects, at the same time, to suppression and resistance being
termed "assumptions of psycho-analysis;" they are results.

The doctrine of infantile sexuality was a somewhat later
acquisition. It had turned out that the events to which the
symptoms of the hysterical were traced back were imaginary scenes
in many cases. It soon became clear that these scenes had been
imagined in order to conceal the auto-erotic activity of early
childhood, and behind these imaginations the sexual life of the
child became revealed in all its extent. Herewith inborn
constitution came into its rights; predisposition and experience
were woven into one inseparable aetiologic unity, each element
being ineffective without the other, and the child's sexual
constitution provoking events of an equally special kind. Freud can
understand that other views of the sexual impulse in relation to
childhood may be put forward, like those of the C. G. Jung school,
but regards them as capricious, formed with too great a regard for
considerations that lie outside the subject, and so remaining
inadequate.

Freud states that he found out the symbolism of dreams for
himself ("I have always held fast to the custom of studying things
before I looked into books"), and only afterwards found out that
Schemer had in some degree preceded him, while later he extended
his view under the influence of "the at first so estimable, and
afterwards wholly abandoned, Stekel." He adds: "The most peculiar
and significant fragment of my dream-theory is the reduction of the
dream-representation to inner conflict, a kind of intimate
insincerity," and this idea he has also found in the writings of J.
Popper. As is known, Freud attaches immense importance to his
doctrine of dream interpretation, and he remarks that he is
accustomed to measure the competence of a psychological
investigator by his relation to this problem.

At first Freud failed to realise what the attitude of the world
would be towards his doctrines; he thought they were merely
contributions to science, like any others. By the atmosphere of
cold emptiness speedily raised around him he was soon made to feel
that medical communications introducing sexuality as an
aetiological factor were not as other medical communications. He
found that he had become one of those who, in the poet's words,
"disturb the world's sleep."

A considerable part of this lengthy paper is a criticism of Jung
and of Adler, too full of matter to be easily condensed. He is not
inclined to rate highly Jung's conception of the "complex," as
involving no psychological theory in itself nor yet capable of
natural insertion into the psychoanalytic theory. Moreover, no word
has been so much abused, and it is frequently employed when it
would be more correct to use "suppression" or "resistance."

Of Adler, Freud speaks with respect as "a significant
investigator, more especially endowed for speculation," whose
studies of the psychic bearing of organic defect are valuable, and
whom he had placed in a position of high responsibility in the
psycho-analytic movement. But that theory was never meant to be "a
complete theory of the human psychic life," but only to enlarge or
correct what experience had otherwise gained. Adler goes far beyond
this and attempts to apply to the whole character and behaviour of
mankind the key intended for its neurotic and psychotic
perversions. Freud admits that "Adler's efforts for a place in the
sun" have had their good results, but his "individual psychology"
is now outside and even hostile to psycho-analysis. Freud proceeds
to criticise forcibly the extreme emphasis which Adler places on
"masculine protest" and on the impulse of aggression. "He leaves no
place for love. One may wonder that so sad a view of the world has
found any recognition; but we must remember that humanity,
oppressed by the yoke of its sexual needs, will accept anything if
only it is offered with the bait of a 'conquest over sexuality'."
Freud is, however, much more favourable to Adler than to Jung.
Adler's doctrine he regards as, indeed, radically false, but he
possesses significance and coherence. Jung's modifications of
psycho-analysis, on the other hand, are confused and obscure; he
has changed the handle of the psycho-analytic instrument and also
put in a new blade, so that it is no longer entitled to bear the
same mark.

Freud observes of his paper that it will cause glee to many to
find the psycho-analysts rending each other. But similar
differences and difficulties, he points out, occur in all
scientific movement. "Perhaps they are usually more carefully
concealed; psycho-analysis, which has destroyed so many
conventional ideals, is in this matter also more sincere."

XXVII. GERMAN POLITICAL
IDEALS

This article appeared in THE NATION, August 5th, 1916.

THE prevailing German political conception of the State as
unrestricted Power is well known in England. Now indeed that the
writings of Treitschke, the most eloquent and influential exponent
of that Prussian ideal, are so extensively translated we have no
excuse for not knowing it. But the mingled protests and enthusiasm
which we hear of as aroused in Germany by Professor F. W. Forster's
article in the Pacifist journal, Die Friedens-Warte, on
"Bismarck's Work in the Light of the Criticism of Greater Germany,"
may usefully remind us that Treitschke's ideal by no means reigns
undisputed. In this remarkable article Forster dismisses
Treitschke—"the Bard of Prussianism"—with contempt; the
"childish Ranke," also, for all his fine feelings, was sunk deep in
the worship of Power; the abstract political philosophy of Hegel
has no meaning for us to-day; and the empty and rhetorical
Addresses of Fichte to the German Nation which young people rave
about—for the most part without reading them, he
remarks—belong to the most worthless part of Fichte's work.
After thus clearing the field, Forster recalls to his countrymen a
nobler German than them all, Constantin Frantz.

It is quite likely that the name of Constantin Frantz, who died
in 1891, is unfamiliar to the average German of to-day, although it
is not many years since Stamm wrote a highly appreciative monograph
on his life and works. Half a century ago, however, Frantz stood
forth con-spicuously as the opponent of Bismarck's policy and the
first champion, in F. List's words, of a German world-policy. Yet
he had himself been for many years a Prussian bureaucrat, in the
service of the Foreign Ministry, and closely associated with
Bismarck until the lines of Bismarckian and Prussian policy became
clear, when Frantz resigned his official position with its promise
of future promotion and gave himself to literary work and
propaganda; the action was characteristic of the devotion to
principle and the high-minded conception of duty which his life
seems throughout to display. He was born (in 1817) near
Halberstadt, the son of a Saxon pastor and a mother who was of
noble French Huguenot origin. Frantz himself always remained
definitely Christian in his outlook and in early life was affected
by the mystico-philosophic influence of Schelling. He was of Saxon
appearance (as his portrait shows) and of Saxon temperament, for he
admits that after living in Brandenburg for nearly thirty years he
never felt at home there, though still regarding himself as "a good
Prussian." He travelled much over Europe in the service of the
State, and was thereby, no doubt, encouraged in his conception of a
Greater Germany consisting of loosely-affiliated free States,
German and Slav, to be in close association with England but
excluding Russia. A warm friendship existed between Frantz and
Richard Wagner, who regarded his friend's views as representing
"the politics of the future." In Austria Frantz's ideas have always
been cherished. He himself believed to the last that he was sowing
the seeds of the future and regarded the German Empire of 1871 as
merely a transitional phase. His new disciple, Professor Forster,
we may regard as a very different type of man. Born in Berlin (in
1869) he is a genuine Brandenburg Prussian of the vigorous and
stubborn old stock, more apt to mould than to be moulded, more
remarkable for fearless and upright strength of character than for
intellectual subtlety or assthetic delicacy. When one observes how
often he has felt called upon to tilt at so-called "advanced" ideas
in his career as an educationalist (in the course of which he has
unsparingly attacked the present writer among others) one might be
tempted to set him down as a merely conservative and reactionary
person. That would be unjust. If that had been the case it is
unlikely either that he would have been subjected to the protests
of his professional colleagues at Munich, or received the
enthusiastic applause of his students; it may be added that it was
characteristic of the man to write his now famous article under his
own name and to justify it publicly in Munich. He has achieved his
opinion slowly and his intellectual career has been throughout
progressive. While his standpoint is now definitely religious and
Christian, he was, we are told, brought up irreligiously; he became
a Socialist, and of so militant a kind that he was at one time sent
to prison; then he studied social questions in England and America,
and finally directed his energies into those moral and educational
lines along which his reputation has been made. He has written a
number of books which have won hearty approval not only in Germany
but abroad; several have been translated into English. Perhaps his
best known work is the comprehensive treatise on moral instruction,
entitled Jugendlehre, which in less than ten years has gone
through more than forty editions and been translated into ten
languages. Forster here adopts an ethical rather than religious
basis, not because he regards religion as unessential but because
the disputes which religion arouses render the neutral foundation
inevitable. It is in this field of popular education that the
Munich Pro-fessor has trained the vigorous and combative mind he is
now turning on to the problem of his country's political crisis,
though still in the spirit of the teacher who is mainly concerned
in directing the ideals of the younger generation, Forster sees
indeed that the evil he combats has been too deeply rooted to be
destroyed by mere political proposals. The younger generation must
first be liberated from the magic webs of false romanticism woven
round the German Empire by an older generation in the name of a
"Real-politik" which is alien to all the most real facts and needs
of the world to-day. That the younger generation will respond to
this appeal Forster has no doubt. With all the rough vigour of his
invective he castigates the desolating national Ego-worship, the
empty, dreary insistence of Germany on its own worth and
magnificence, the fantastic nonsense of Pan-German propaganda, and
declares that all who can observe German youth know how profoundly
it is revolting against this false and narrow Nationalism. In the
cultivation of worthier, and, as he would have us believe, more
genuinely German ideals, young Germany must throw aside Fichte and
Hegel and Treitschke and turn to Frantz.

When we turn to Frantz we note that, while he was in the
beginning sympathetically associated with Bismarck, as the policy
of the great founder of the Empire more clearly developed all his
writings became ever more concentrated on the penetrating criticism
of Bismarck's work. They had something in common; Frantz was really
as little of a democrat as Bismarck; they were both prepared to
admit a sort of Socialism; neither had any love for bureaucracy;
and, above all, both desired to end that separatist particularism
of the small States which had for so long been the bane of Germany.
But here they parted company; in method and in spirit they were
alike opposed. Bismarck was a mighty opportunist—always
swayed (as Lamprecht has insisted) by a comprehensive vision of the
circumstances of the moment—and the opportunities he sought
were not, after the English manner, for compromise, but for the
swift and simple decisions of blood and iron. Frantz was not merely
a man of wide political training but something of a philosopher and
even a man of science, who believed that States had their natural
physiology and needed the harmonious conditions for freedom and
development. He refused to start, in the Hegelian manner, with
abstract ideas of what a State ought to be; we must regard a State
as a natural product, investigate what it is, and so attain "a
natural doctrine of the State." The German question can thus only
be solved in harmony with the collective policy of Europe, and it
should be the aim of Germany, not to become to Europe a huge
militarism with an antagonising Prussian point, but, rather, an
organisational centre of crystallisation which by its own internal
free and healthy development might become a guardian of the
interests of Europe. Bismarck, however, had sought, and apparently
achieved, the defeat of lesser particularisms by the establishment
of a greater particularism, crushing all the rest, the supreme
dominance of Prussia. For Frantz that policy was not merely the
abandonment of Germany's greater mission in the world, it meant
entering a path that could only end in catastrophe. And Forster
comes forward to tell us that to-day we may all see that Frantz was
absolutely right.

The leading idea of Frantz throughout is that the political
constitution which alone suits the needs of Germany is a federation
of States, the free political association of a group of independent
and related peoples; this conception would exclude centralisation
except for definite purposes of organisation and exclude also the
mechanical unity produced by the power of a single dominating
national State. Such a federation would thus be altogether unlike
the present Prussianised German Empire. It would be much more on
the lines of the old Holy Roman Empire as it existed in the time of
the Hohenstaufen Frederick II in the thirteenth century. Forster,
in following Frantz on this point, remarks that it is very
undesirable that a German Emperor should also be King of Prussia,
and recalls that the Abbe de St. Pierre, in putting forth his
famous project for the United States of Europe, specially referred
to the old Germanic Empire as the anticipation of such a Federation
of States.

Such a political conception is put forward as in conformity with
those special functions which Germany is best able to exercise in
the world, that is to say her power of organisation and her
supposed international aptitudes. In both these respects, however
imperfectly, by holding together a federation of independent
nationalities in free association, the old German Empire, as Frantz
often declared, was the pioneer of a great political ideal,
performing a service to the whole of Christendom, and at the same
time attaining its own finest development. He points out that even
Prussia in those early days was working in the same spirit, for
Prussia was originally merely a German colonisation process for
holding back the hordes of the East and assimilating the Western
Slavs, adding their White Eagle to its own Black Eagle to
constitute a national emblem. The new German Empire is in no sense
a revival of that old Empire, for it drops altogether the latter's
super-national function and it perverts organisational activity to
egoistic nationalism. It is based on the later and totally
different political ideal of Renaissance Sovereignty with its
Machiavellian recognition of the right of the State to exercise its
might for its own sole ends, a right which, as Gierke has ably
shown, medieval political theory had altogether rejected. It is on
the later Machiavellian basis that a single nationality in the
group is entitled to dominate the rest and to menace the outside
world.

It will be seen that Frantz, followed by his disciple Forster,
moves on a somewhat conservative plane. He rejects a political
ideal which, however it may seem to flourish to-day in Germany is
by no means modern, in favour of a yet more ancient ideal, though
of a much nobler order: the "synthesis of organisation and
independence," a federalism of free States, dimly outlined by Kant
and still earlier sketched in the real practice of the Holy Roman
Empire. Of the democratic political ideal on an individualistic
basis, which we regard as more genuinely modern, he has nothing to
say, though there may be room for its development within the
frame-work of Frantz's free federation. Of the Government
Bund set up by the Congress of Vienna Forster has only to
say that it was "lacking in inspiration and will," not that it was
undemocratic. It is perhaps possible to maintain that the question
of a democratic constitution in Germany is still Utopian. But there
can be no doubt that the question of the function and mutual
relation of States, as illustrated by the policy of Prussia and the
present condition of the German Empire, is very actual indeed.

If there is any one outcome of the war of which we can speak
with confidence it is that, whatever the precise results may be,
they cannot fail to bring the German Empire and Austro-Hungary into
a yet closer relationship than existed before the war. The very
policy of the Allies unites the interests of the two Central
Empires, and renders some degree of association inevitable. But we
cannot imagine a Prussianised Austria and, as we know, the first
decisive act of a would-be Prussianised Austria has produced a
crash to shake the world. In the German Empire itself, even in
Prussia, Prussianisation has not succeeded in working
assimilatively either on Poles or Danes or Alsatians. When Austria
conies into the question we cannot fail to see the importance of a
political conception which, as Frantz developed it, was specially
designed to conciliate the Western and Southern Slavs, in direct
opposition to the Great German Empire. Germans to-day, indeed, have
to reckon with, as they seem more or less clearly to begin to
realise, the failure of "Real-Politik" and the bankruptcy of
Bismarckian policy. In neutral countries one may sometimes detect a
kind of sympathy with Germany faced by such a multitude of hostile
nations and races, the finest peoples from Europe and America and
Asia arid Africa and Australia. And in Germany itself, before the
war as well as since, the question has often been asked, Why are we
Germans not loved? and seldom any answer found but one, so pathetic
in its instinctive self-esteem: "Envy and jealousy." Another answer
is becoming clearer to-day. It is beginning to be seen that the
policy of offensive Egoism, the morality of Blood and Iron, is
hardly more lovable in a State than it is in an individual. It was
Bismarck who, more than any other statesman, made that policy the
active and effective policy of Germany in the world. But Bismarck
was far too sagacious, he was far too closely in touch with general
European diplomacy, not to safeguard and qualify his own policy; he
could be ruthless, but he was not reckless. We know that Bismarck
was no enthusiast for the risks of colonisation; that he was not in
favour of a great German fleet; that he would never have permitted
the invasion of Belgium; that in any national crisis he would have
taken pains to ensure the benevolent neutrality of England.
Bismarck himself was thus strong enough to avoid the precipice to
which, as the insight of Frantz clearly discerned, his policy led.
In the hands of his weaker and more reckless successors, it is
another matter, for that brutal frankness of the German temperament
which Treitschke half deplored and altogether admired hardly
consorts with weakness and recklessness. All the world now, even
including Germans themselves, is beginning to estimate at its true
worth the Real-Politik of the State as Power.

The nineteenth century was largely dominated by the political
ideal of Nationalism. The world grovelled in the dust before the
sacred rights of a Nation to the free development of its latently
aggressive desires. Nobody ever saw a Frankenstein in the
noble-hearted heroes who led an oppressed nationality to
self-conscious might. There are few worshippers of unrestricted
Nationalism left now; with the example of Prussia before us, in the
face of the Great War of to-day, one searches in vain for any
homage to that disgraced political ideal. Men's eyes are to-day
directed towards another ideal, or, as some of us may think,
another illusion. They see the hope of human progress not in the
blind and senseless greed of Nationalities, mutually destructive,
but in the harmonious developments of a co-ordinated
Inter-Nationalism. It is no longer the claims of Nationalism which
men feel called upon to strengthen; they feel more impelled to
create a Super-Nationalism which shall hold Nationalism in due
check. And now we see that it is not only among ourselves that
these new and greater ideals are germinating. The Germans, who have
been of late the deadliest foes to Inter-Nationalism, now also
begin to follow in the same direction, though in their own way and
by their own methods.

XXVIII. THE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF
WESTERN EUROPE

This review of Professor H. J. Figure's HUMAN GEOGRAPHY IN
WESTERN EUROPE appeared in the NATION, April 27th, 1918.

THE human problems of Western Europe have to-day sprung into new
life. Few of us have felt any passionate interest in the course of
man's history, and most had no clear idea of the special
significance of Europe even in the present. The immense upheaval we
witness to-day has suggested to them that they have been asleep.
They dimly begin to feel that they inhabit one of the storm centres
of the world, for thousands of years the perpetual stage of
evolutions and revolutions, of expansions and catastrophes, of
declinations and ascensions. It is the moment when the men of
science whose lives have been spent in deciphering the ancient
records of these movements are called upon to throw what
illumination they can upon the problems, new and yet old, of
Western Europe.

Professor Fleure is one of the men of science among us best
equipped to respond to this invitation, which has come to him
through Professor Patrick Geddes and Mr. Victor Branford, editors
of "The Making of the Future Series." His brilliant and elaborate
studies of the populations of Western Europe, especially the
lengthy investigation of the nature and distribution of Welsh types
published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute
two years ago, are well known to all interested in such matters.
Receptively in touch with the most up-to-date researches of others,
he has displayed fine skill in analysing and grouping human types,
in showing their relationship to the ancient populations of our
islands, and in indicating the probable lines of their migration
and the varying reasons for their distribution and development. It
may be said indeed that he was predestined to success in such
investigations. A native of the Channel Islands, and, as his name
seems to indicate, of the ancient Anglicised Norman people long
settled there, he studied in various parts of Europe, especially in
Germany and Switzerland, reaching the study of Man, as have some
other notable anthropologists, by the great natural highroad of
Zoology. It is clear that Professor Fleure is singularly well
prepared by birth and training, as well as by his later studies of
the complex problem presented by Wales, to deal adequately with the
great subject he has here undertaken; even the special fascination
which the migrational paths of peoples and cultures possess for him
may be said to be predetermined; and this equipment is accompanied
by those personal qualities without which all equipment is useless.
We are throughout conscious in his writings of a high degree of
intelligence, sensitive and versatile, of a sane balance, of a fine
power of sympathetic appreciation, even rarer.

There are various angles at which the spiritual life of a people
or group of peoples may be studied. Buckle, sixty years ago,
enumerated these as Climate, Food, Soil, and the General Aspect of
Nature in its psychic influences, dismissing superciliously in a
footnote the element of Heredity, which nowadays, in its social as
well as racial aspects, seems to many the most important of all.
Climate, which Buckle placed first, has found diligent exponents of
late, especially since its probable changes in even recent times
have come to be recognised, and this aspect has lately found a
capable exponent in Ellsworth Huntington. Professor Fleure selects
Soil, and is primarily concerned to view European peoples from the
geographical angle, but not exclusively, nor can he fail to take
into account climate, since climate and soil mutually interact on
each other, though we should not accept the common confusion of
meteorology with geography. To study a population from a special
angle is arbitrary and incomplete, but it is an entirely legitimate
and scientific method. It clarifies and unifies vision, rendering
possible a coherent picture in a small space. The geographical
angle lends itself, it is true, to the solemn enunciation of vague
formulas which are rather futile; Professor Fleure, always quick in
perception, apologises for such formulations as "trite but useful,"
and elsewhere admits that these external physical circumstances by
no means serve completely to determine human fate and character. It
is, indeed, because he takes the geographical angle lightly, and
sees, even asserts, the importance of the others, that his
exposition is so helpful.

It is no disparagement to an admirable little book to have to
say that it fails in some respects to fulfil the high expectations
which its author's qualities and equipment raise. For this the
author may doubtless throw much of the responsibility on the
editors, the publisher, and the difficult conditions of the time.
The task of compressing a study of all the peoples of the West,
great and little, even when considered mainly under a single
aspect, within two hundred and fifty small pages involves a sketchy
and sometimes bald treatment; this condensed method might have been
supported by footnotes on matters of detail, but there is only a
single footnote in the whole volume, though that (on the historical
importance of salt) is so instructive that the reader would have
been thankful for many such notes. The diagrammatic maps, also, are
few, rough, and unsatisfactory. A still more serious defect is the
complete absence of precise references; the value of such a book as
this for all serious readers is largely that it serves as an
introduction to what for most is a new subject; it attracts
attention to an important field and serves as a sign-post to the
roads that lead there. In other words, the reader needs at the end
of the volume, or of each chapter, a brief critical bibliography,
of which we here find no trace beyond a few vague references in the
Preface. This defect, which would have cost so little to repair,
is, frankly speaking, inexcusable, and when left to himself,
Professor Fleure, as his other writings show, is guilty of no such
negligence. Let us hope that (as the Preface seems to hint) this
little book is a fore-taste of a larger and more comprehensive work
in which the author's great gifts and fine equipment will have free
scope.

It would be ungracious to insist on the defects of a book which
is so illuminative and at the present time so helpful. Professor
Fleure calls it in the sub-title, "A Study in Appreciation."
Rightly understood, it is perhaps needless to remark,
"appreciation" is not indiscriminate eulogy but critical valuation
in which the emphasis is on the sympathetic side. At the present
time we tend to arrange the peoples of Europe into two groups,
according as they are fighting or likely to fight on our side, and
fighting or likely to fight on the opposite side, the one group
being all white and the other group all black; which side we are
fighting on makes no difference as the colours can be reversed at
will. Now Professor Fleure is aware of the Great War and alludes to
it profitably more than once. But he is also aware that the
characteristics of nations are not dependent on the shifting
chances of local opinion, but are determined by factors rooted in
the far past. Against the caprices of opinion, to which he never
alludes, he sets forth his "appreciation" of the parts played in
the world by the different peoples of Western Europe, parts
necessarily determined for them by the circumstances of the world
acting on their own hereditary traits. Herein—if a reviewer
may be permitted to say so whose own estimates happen in every case
to coincide—the author reveals a fine discrimination and a
soundly balanced judgment. France comes first, because, by her
geographical position and psychic characteristics, she is the "Way
of Light age after age," with "a position of natural leadership in
the spiritual life of Western Europe." The Iberian Peninsula,
perhaps to the surprise of those who take a narrow and temporary
view of European culture, comes next, transcending in achievements,
as Professor Fleure acknowledges, merely physical circumstances,
the first of European lands to expand in the modern world and with
a yet unexhausted reservoir of energy, so that, as the author,
following others, remarks, even the backwardness of Spain in the
present age of centralisation and industrialism may be an advantage
to that country and the world in the next stage of evolution. Italy
comes next, and here we may note as characteristic the author's
carefully balanced attitude towards Italian Imperialism, as
"ambitions perhaps justifiable, perhaps dangerous, but at least
easily understandable in a period that has been obsessed by
aggressive expansionism;" but he thinks that circumstances,
geographical and industrial, under the conditions of the immediate
future, will give increased importance to Italy who may
influentially help to inaugurate a new era of co-operation, and we
"must hope that her thinkers may guide her away from the
allurements of expansionism." Germany occupies geographically a
peculiar and exposed "corridor position" in Europe, and this fact,
with its tendency to favour migratory movements, the everlasting
difficulty in drawing a definite frontier line, and the inevitable
militarism, makes it necessary for the author to give a vague title
to the entirely fair and dispassionate chapter mainly devoted to
Germany; he points out that the Elbe is really the great German
river and seeks to explain how it has come about that Leipzig and
Magdeburg, either of which might have been the great Germanic
capital, with immense benefit to the world and to Germany herself,
have unfortunately had to yield the first place to Berlin; he
further remarks on the fact that much that is rightly applauded and
respected in Germany has really been elaborated by the
comparatively free small nations on her borders. Bohemia,
Switzerland, Holland, Flanders, Wallony, and Luxemburg are briefly
considered in well-packed sections. A separate section is also
given to Alsace and Lorraine. As we know, half a century ago the
most conspicuous representatives of English opinion, men such as
Carlyle and Kingsley, were jubilant at the prospect of the return
of these provinces to Germany; to-day their successors look forward
with equal joy to the reversion of the same provinces to France; if
these hopes are fulfilled, another shifting of British judgment
will be due half a century hence. Professor Fleure makes no
reference, however, to the weathercock of public opinion; he is
concerned only with fundamental facts, and the essential fact here
is that these "woefully placed" provinces, while more closely
linked with the Latin than the Germanic civilisation, yet occupy a
genuinely intermediate position, tolerant partakers of both
civilisations, with the special function, which in earlier
centuries they exercised beneficially, of mediating between France
and Germany and especially of adapting the waves of civilisation
from the French side to the needs and aptitudes of the German side;
it is impossible to read the history of German literature without
perpetually coming on to Strassburg as the great centre of
diffusion of spiritual life. The chapter devoted to Britain is
placed last, and here Professor Fleure is reticent in
characterisation; but he lucidly sets forth the factors which
influenced the development of this group of islands off the French
coast, at the extreme western corner of Europe, the last goal of
ancient pathways from the north and from the Mediterranean and from
the Great European plain, and he points out how conditions which
once made Britain backward, and later placed her at the centre, now
make it necessary for her to combine with Eastern neighbours and to
pay more attention than before to international co-operation. It
need scarcely be added that the author views favourably a League of
Nations, though he points out that it is not always clear what a
"nation" should be, and that the most favourably constituted
nations are not those in which a single racial element prevails (he
considers that Switzerland has perhaps suffered from this cause),
but those in which the elements are mixed, and so apt for a
many-sided activity in the world.

In the immediate past, nationalism has been the prevailing
ideal, with what results we know. There is still a place for
nationalism, even for that of the small nations. But in so far as
nationalism means the rule of suspicion and hatred, of mutual
antagonism, of perpetual aggression, it has ceased either to fulfil
our needs or to correspond to our knowledge. Europe, we are
beginning to learn, is a complex living organism, made of the same
stuff throughout and on the same plan, yet everywhere with subtle
differences in the composition. It has thus come about that each
national group acts as an organ with its own special functions,
itself dependent on the whole and yet imparting valuable elements
on which that whole is dependant. What happens when that great
central fact of the European situation fails to be recognised we
see to-day. The health and sanity of Europe can only be reached by
that road of intelligent and large-hearted "appreciation" along
which Professor Fleure offers to guide us. There are few who by
reading and meditating this little book will fail to become better
qualified to fulfil their duties as "good Europeans."

XXIX. THE BIOLOGY OF WAR

This is a review of the English translation by Constance and
Julian Grande of G. F. Nicolai's THE BIOLOGY OF WAR. It appeared in
the DAILY HERALD for April 5th, 1919.

PRUSSIA, we have often been told, is the European home of
militaristic nationalism. We are not so often told, though it is
equally true, that Prussia, and indeed Germany in general, is also
the home of internationalism. Even in the Great War Germany has
produced, in larger numbers than any other country, men of
acknowledged eminence who have been willing to face degradation,
poverty, imprisonment, and exile out of their devotion to the
cause. Among this noble band a high place belongs to the author of
the present book.

Dr. Nicolai is a physician, a leading heart specialist, who once
successfully treated the ex-Empress, and he was also Professor of
Physiology in the University of Berlin. But he has always been
opposed to Prussian militarism, and when the war broke out he
publicly protested against the violation of Belgium. Thereupon he
was deprived of his professorship and sent to the fortress of
Gra'udenz, his property being confiscated, and his wife left
penniless. She, it may be remarked, proved a worthy comrade, for
when the rich Junker family to which she belongs offered to provide
her with a comfortable home if she would forsake her husband, she
replied that she would sooner be a charwoman or a street-cleaner.
It was in the fortress that this work was written. Dr. Nicolai was
so stirred by the famous patriotic manifesto of the Ninety-Three
German Intellectuals (many of them speedily recanted, however) that
he resolved to deal exhaustively with the subject of war. It was
out of the question for such a book to be published in Germany, but
it was luckily possible to convey it to Switzerland, where it was
duly issued at Zurich, and widely read. The result was that the
author was promptly condemned to five months' imprisonment in a
common gaol, and subsequent internment. Finally, by the help of
friends, he escaped in an aeroplane to Denmark. Now, it is said,
though in the prime of life, and possessed of a vigorous
constitution, he looks an aged and broken man.

The Biology of War is written in the characteristically
German extensive, deep, and thorough way, so that, though vigorous
and pungent, it is a serious piece of reading. Throughout it is
addressed to the German public, and there are no attacks on enemy
countries, the references to England, for instance, being friendly
and appreciative. This, however, is not to be taken, the author
points out, as an admission that Germany is a sinner above all
sinners, but is the result of a belief that it is the duty of every
citizen to attack evil first in his own country.

Dr. Nicolai begins at the beginning with war among animals, and
decides that it has no existence. Animals would, indeed, have
nothing to gain by war, and the only creatures which wage war,
properly so called, are the ants and the bees. They possess
property, and that brings us to what the author justly regards as
the chief root of the matter. Among men, also, it was not until
property began to grow valuable that war seems to have arisen,
perhaps about ten thousand years ago, that is to say, in
comparatively recent times, more than 100,000 years after the
invention of tools. The author, like others before him, easily
shows that war has nothing to do with Darwinian natural selection.
Man is naturally one of the most timid and defenceless of
creatures, and it was not until he attained a certain degree of
civilisation that war developed. The same is true of cannibalism
and of slavery, which is intimately associated with war. Relics of
slavery still exist in the exploitation of the worker. War and
slavery are one, based on the inordinate lust for property, that is
to say, on robbery. This is the main root of war. There are other
factors; thus the author scarcely allows for the expansive force of
over-population, and says nothing of the effect of birth-control in
checking the exploitation of the workers, and removing a stimulus
to war.

Dr. Nicolai is not what is called a pacifist. He recognises that
in the past war has had a real social function, and in the classic
world it was only by slavery that leisure could be found for the
necessary progress of civilisation. It will always be man's part to
struggle, but war has become merely mischievous, and "cat-fights
with cannon" are paltry beside the vast tasks that face mankind.
Here war is worse than useless, for the victors in war only enter
the road to ruin.

It is impossible in a short space even to mention all the topics
here discussed and often put in a new light. The book suffers,
indeed, from the fact that it is specially aimed at German readers,
and from the conditions under which it was written. When we recall
that the author was ruined, in prison, with few books at hand and
no friends to consult, we realise that The Biology of War is
a marvellous intellectual feat. We admire the high spirit and
courage of the man as much as his learning, his memory, his
vigorous ability to think. For men are still, unfortunately, only
to a limited extent thinking animals. Frederick, whom we term the
Great, the author remarks, really deserved that title when he
declared: "If my soldiers began to think, not one would remain in
the ranks."

XXX. RELIGION AND SEX

This review of RELIGION AND SEX: STUDIES IN THE PATHOLOGY or
RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT, by Chapman Cohen, appeared in the OBSERVER
in 1919.

THE religious impulse and the sexual impulse are among the
primary instincts of human life and civilisation. If, indeed, we
add to them the impulse of hunger we cover almost the whole field
of Man's evolution. We have, that is to say, the economic factor
which is the impelling force of so many human activities; we have
the procreative factor which is the source of the family; and we
have that factor of awe, admiration, and reverence for the
phenomena of Nature which began to mould Man's ideas at the outset,
and later inspired so much of his art, which now has itself assumed
for many the ancient function of religion. Even science, which in
recent times has so largely re-moulded human thoughts and
activities, may be an outgrowth of that magic which in earlier
times was the inseparable companion of religion. Such at least is
the opinion of Sir James Frazer and Professor Mc-Dougall, though
Dr. Marett is inclined to doubt it. It is, however, his deepest
primary impulses which Man is most unwilling to investigate. He
shuns them, he veils them, he declares that they are too sacred, if
not indeed too disgusting, to talk about, he refuses even to name
them. He lays what is anthropologically termed a taboo upon them.
Thus the early Hebrews had to invent another name for their god as
his real name was too awful to pronounce, and we do much the same
with various important parts of our own bodies, speaking, for
instance, of the "stomach" when what we really mean is not the
stomach at all. It is not two centuries since men first ventured to
begin analysing the economic factors of life; a century ago it was
an offence to question the orthodox religion, and even yet a man
may be sent to prison for "blasphemy" if he speaks too
disrespectfully of that religion; while the scientific study of sex
is only of yesterday, and even to-day it is uncertain whether the
most calmly psychological investigation of that subject may not be
construed as "obscenity" and call for a prosecution.

When two of these great elemental impulses overlap—as is
specially apt to happen with religion and sex—the taboo is
still more rigidly imposed. Swift described the blending of the two
kinds of emotions as observed in his day (among Dissenters,
naturally, since he was himself a Churchman), and with so much
clear precision that his publisher mutilated the statement. During
the last century various distinguished physicians have remarked on
the same tendency, usually as found in hysterical and insane
persons. It is only of recent years (passing over an appendix on
the erotic factor in religion in Studies in the Psychology of
Sex) that Mr. Theodore Schroeder of New York has written a
number of lengthy studies on this subject, which he has named
"Erotogenesis." Now at length Mr. Chapman Cohen decides that the
time has come for a comprehensive popular statement in volume form
of the outlines of the relationship between religion and sex.

Mr. Cohen sets himself at the Rationalist, or, as he would
prefer to say, scientific standpoint, and finds the explanation of
all religious phenomena in "the workings of natural forces
imperfectly understood." He admits that our knowledge needs to be
increased, and he wisely refrains from discussing the origins of
religion. He is less concerned with the normal functions of
religion, with what he terms its physiology, than with its
pathology. He emphatically disclaims at the outset any belief that
religion has its origin in perverted sexuality. He simply wishes to
deal with certain conditions of the expression of the religious
idea, and also with the study of normal frames of mind like
"conversion," which are, he believes, misinterpreted, and diverted
into religious channels. These normal and abnormal processes, he
claims, will explain many of the manifestations of religion, but
they will not, even all of them combined, suffice to explain
religion.

With this conclusion, indeed, as regards many of the topics of
this book, most people are already agreed. About the
eroto-religious manifestations in lunatic asylums, the ecstasies of
some mediaeval saints, the religious epidemics of the Middle Ages,
and the witch-mania of a rather later age, there is now little
question. On some other points, it is possible, Mr. Cohen's
conclusions may need some qualification. Thus while, as he rightly
points out in the most valuable chapter of his book, the process of
conversion, so commonly taking place at puberty or adolescence, is
really a normal process, correlated with the sexual development of
that age, and the sign of a new mental and emotional readjustment
to wider conceptions of life, only thrown into conventional
religious channels by the force of tradition and imitation, he
scarcely conceives the process widely enough. He regards it as "the
entry of the individual into the life of the race," the craving for
communion with one's fellows and for service to the State. It is
often, and perhaps normally, something much more than that. It is
the satisfaction of a craving for harmonious union not merely with
mankind but with the laws of the Universe which are apt to seem so
cold and cruel to the young who think and feel; it is the process
by which the Self ceases to experience any hostile or alien
emotions towards the Not-self. Such a process is emotional and it
is merely an accident that it is perverted into traditional
channels or associated with any intellectual beliefs. Mysticism,
though the term is so often misused, has a similar biological
kernel which Mr. Cohen overlooks. It is really the most complete
form of "conversion," not, as our author would have it, a magical
method of discovering objective truth, but simply an interior
emotional process by which joy and harmony are attained in a new
personal vision of the Universe; all the rest is mere accidental
accretion.

Mr. Cohen, we see, though he is politely respectful to opponents
(except to the late Professor William James), is rather too fearful
of yielding ground to the dreaded representatives of
"super-naturalism." The result is that while he is obviously out of
sympathy with the ancient religious attitude he is not altogether
in touch with the modern scientific attitude. On the one hand, he
brings forward a little sketch of St. Theresa's life in which he
solemnly states that "she died at the early age of thirty-three,"
an age when, it is scarcely necessary to say, the second and
practically fruitful half of that supreme woman saint's life had
not even begun. On the other hand he ignores some of the chief
modern scientific students of religion, and sometimes singularly
overlooks those whom he quotes just when they would be most to his
point. Thus he quotes both Frazer and Westermarck, but when these
distinguished investigators would have helped him to clarify his
attempt to deal with ancient religious prostitution he quotes
neither, preferring to cultivate an old-fashioned taste for mere
curiosities. He never appeals to Preuss or Marett or McDougall or
even Freud. Most astonishing of all, he never once mentions the
name of Theodore Schroeder who during recent years has published in
various scientific journals over a dozen substantial studies of
this very subject of sex and religion, containing valuable
observations and documents. This omission is the more remarkable
since Schroeder happens also to be the most valiant living
champion, from the legal side, of that "Freethought" with which Mr.
Cohen identifies himself.

Mr. Cohen's strength lies in his resolve to apply native common
sense and intelligence to some of the deepest and most vital
problems of human life. It is just because they are deep and vital
that these problems become overlaid by dead superstitions belonging
to the past. Even those who think it is daring to disturb such
survivals may well be grateful to Mr. Cohen for enabling them to
face these naked and living realities which, rightly seen, must
always be more beautiful and more satisfying than the survivals of
a dead past.

XXXI. UNLOCKING THE HEART OF
GENIUS

This review of Albert Mordell's book, THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN
LITERATURE, was published in the NATION for August 9th, 1919.

"THE less Shakespeare he!" So exclaimed Browning in defiance of
Wordsworth's statement that Shakespeare had in his sonnets
"unlocked his heart." Men of genius, with a modesty that is
reinforced by vanity, have often shown a similar excess of
indignation at the idea that any of their caste should be thought
to have revealed their hearts, or even been shown to possess any
hearts to reveal. The camp-followers and self-appointed body-guards
of individual persons of genius are liable to be thrown into a
state of fury when this is achieved, or even attempted, for their
own particular deity. Some of us can still remember the outburst of
shocked hero-worship with which Sir James Crichton-Browne received
Froude's life of Carlyle, or, more recently, Miss May Sinclair's
elaborate defence of Charlotte Bronte's prim respectability against
the penetrating insight of Angus Mackay and one or two others. We
know now that Carlyle was justified of the biographer he had
himself chosen, and Miss May Sinclair's arguments were scarcely
published before the keen and sympathetic intuition oc Angus Mackay
was at length made clear by the discovery of Charlotte Bronte's
letters to M. Heger.

The world in general, which needs all the spiritual nourishment
that genius can give, has not been greatly troubled by the outcries
of such perverse champions of genius. It has always received the
revelation of the heart of the man of genius as it receives the
revelation of his art, with a shudder at first and then with
everlasting thankfulness. How should it be otherwise? The tasks of
life are hard for the best of us—the harder, indeed, the
better we are—and we must needs be endlessly grateful to
those, our more splendid fellow-men, who aid us in the achievement
of these tasks, or console us for our failure to achieve them. It
is inevitable, and it is natural, that we should desire to know
what were the secret experiences that gave these, as it seems,
privileged persons the power to help us, for in learning those
secrets that power over us becomes more potent, since our sympathy
is henceforth more intimate. Thus it is that we no longer find
profit in treating Shakespeare, after the manner of August von
Schlegel, as a demi-god; he has become for us a human being whose
experiences we seek, however tentatively, to divine, and Brandes,
following the clues of various English pioneers, has taken the
place of Schlegel as the typical Shakespearian commentator. With
men long since dead these attempts can seldom be more than
tentative, and when, as happens by a rare chance, they are made by
those who were in a position to achieve triumphant success our
gratitude is often long in purifying itself from a tinge of
contempt for those to whom we owe so much. Boswell seemed somewhat
of a hero-worshipping simpleton before his consummate art was
recognised, and the exquisite art of Eckermann has never been
recognised even yet.

It is not therefore surprising that a strong taint of disgust
still clings to the most recent, the most daring, and certainly the
most hazardous, group of attempts to unlock the heart of genius.
There has, indeed, from the first, in the eyes of most people, been
something unpleasant in the theories of psycho-analysis, even when
applied to the ordinary population, and it is natural they should
seem still more offensive when applied to genius. Thus, though
Freud and his immediate disciples have made numerous
psycho-analytic studies of genius, there have been few attempts in
English. Some interest therefore attaches to Mr. Albert Mordell's
recent book, The Erotic Motive in Literature.

There is much in Mr. Mordell's book which is likely to confirm
the worst opinions of the opponents of psycho-analysis. Even the
sympathetic critic of Freud has to admit that he is apt to confuse
a possibility with a probability, and that, when the particular
fact really is clear, he will often generalise it unduly. In his
followers these tendencies sometimes become habits, which it can
scarcely be said Mr. Mordell has always escaped, even though he
tells us that he has maintained a double guard over himself, so as
not to cross the danger line. Pascal, A'Kempis, and Bunyan, he
tells us, were neurotics, who, "no doubt" by repressed love, were
rendered religious maniacs. Every sufferer in literature, he
declares comprehensively on the next page—Werther, Anna
Karenina, Hedda Gabler, and the rest—is a partly or fully
developed case of neurosis, with, at least, emotional disturbance
due to sex causes. Such random and unsupported statements, familiar
as they now are in psycho-analytic writings, must not, however,
induce us to throw Mr. Mordell's book aside. There is more in it
than those scraps of routine doctrine from the school. Mr.
Mordell's scholarship, which is considerable, was not got up to
prove a psycho-pathological thesis. He was a sympathetic,
penetrating, and original student of literature long before he ever
heard of Freud. Indeed, he regards psycho-analysis itself as much
older than Freud. In Swift, in Johnson, in Sainte-Beuve, in Lamb,
in Taine, he finds that profound insight into human nature of which
psychoanalysis is merely a modern and specialised form. In some
writers, indeed, Freud's ideas and methods are even definitely
anticipated. Hazlitt, especially in his essay on dreams, "gave
almost complete expression to the views of Freud;" Bagehot really
initiated the psycho-analytic study of Shakespeare; and, before
Freud, Georg Brandes went far in developing the same methods.

It is, we see, in the sane and broad sense that, on the whole,
Mr. Mordell understands psychoanalysis. He realises that, in a
sense, literature is more real and eternal than life itself; the
man of genius speaks out of an inmost soul of humanity that in life
is buried and unseen. The world he builds up is the very opposite
of that in which he was constrained to dwell. The day-dream is the
beginning of literary creation, and, as we know, the day-dream is
moulded by plastic forces which reside in the unconscious sphere,
so that what has been repressed from the artist's life, or never
been able to enter life, becomes transformed and emerges in radiant
images of immortal beauty. Psycho-analysis thus becomes, as Mr.
Mordell sees it, the justification of genius. It enables us to see
through the discredited doctrine that genius is merely a form of
degeneracy or insanity. There are, without the possibility of
doubt, elements of neurosis commonly present in genius; the process
of genius is with difficulty conceivable without them; literature
is, indeed, "largely a record of the anxieties and hysterias of
humanity." They are simply another aspect of what to the
psychoanalyst are the repressions dating from an infantile age. It
is in the ennobling transmutation of these that genius consists;
and the great thinker tells how they may be avoided, and the great
humanitarian shows how they may be conquered, and the great artist
liberates us by converting them into loveliness. Mr. Mordell finds
that men of genius have nothing to lose by this method of study; on
the contrary, we are enabled to appreciate their work better, and
by gaining a more sympathetic insight into their minds we may
acquire a higher esteem for their personal characters; he
especially mentions Byron and Poe.

As the title of his book indicates, and as we should expect in
an adherent of Freud's main doctrines, Mr. Mordell deals largely
with the nature of the individual author's love-life as influential
in conditioning the nature of his work. Thus we have chapters on
"The Infantile Love Life and its Sublimations," and "Sexual
Symbolism in Literature." But his wide knowledge of literary
history and the broad conception of psycho-analysis which he has
adopted enable him to select for detailed study only such examples
as fairly lend themselves to his method. Thus, when discussing
Renan, in connection with the thesis that a writer puts himself
into his work far more than he knows, the author effectively points
out how Renan's Life of Jesus is really a life of Renan
himself, and that, when it is compared with Renan's autobiography,
a close resemblance is found between his own qualities and those
which he attributes to the Jesus of his creation. Not, indeed, as
Mr. Mordell is well aware, that an author puts only the best of
himself into his work; it is not only his imperfectly realised
aspirations towards an impossible best which he thus unconsciously
embodies, but also the more possible worst which, with equal
unconsciousness, he struggles by expressing it to overcome. Even
the Devil is simply the symbolisation of our Unconscious, the
struggling emergence of hidden primitive desires, the eruption of
forbidden thoughts. It is because he has his home in dreams that he
has so mightily interested mankind. The fascination of the villain
everywhere in literature, indeed, is due to the recognition in him
of "a long-forgotten brother." Raskolnikoff, Julian Sorel, George
Aurispa, as Mr. Mordell truly observes, were drawn out of their
creators' own natures. "I too might have been this," was the
thought behind the minds of Dostoieffsky, of Stendhal, of
D'Annunzio. If it were not so the artists' creations would largely
lose their—in the Aristotelian sense—cathartic virtue
over us.

Cowper, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Whitman, Poe, Lafcadio Hearn,
and other famous artists are reviewed by the author in the
psycho-analytic spirit, from one point or another. Sometimes the
dominating emotional attraction of the mother is shown as in
Cowper, or sublimated infantilism as in Whitman, or transformed
eroticism as in Wordsworth, or sexual symbolism as in Browning, or
unfulfilled desire as in Keats, or the perpetual haunting presence
of death as in Poe who had loved so many women who had died young.
As these attempts to analyse genius are brought before us,
sometimes, it may be, with a shock of surprise, we yet learn to
feel a deeper pity and sympathy. The poets who have survived, we
realise, have been the most personal poets. Every truly great man
of letters, novelist as well as poet, even by virtue of his art,
must wear his heart on his sleeve. There is no great book in the
world of which it cannot be said, as Whitman said of his: "Whoso
touches this book touches a man."

Psycho-analysis helps to make clear how the man of genius, even
in the supreme achievements of his art, is yet moulding that art
out of the stuff of all our souls. It is the plastic force which is
greater, and not the substance moulded which is necessarily either
superior or different. In enabling us to see that, we realise,
also, why it is that genius makes so intimate an appeal to us, why
it enlarges and liberates us, why it purifies us from secret
stains, why it imparts to us new powers. It is in our own souls
that its dramas are played out. If the great poets of the world had
not unlocked their own hearts they could not unlock ours. If they
had not gloriously revealed our own suppressed desires, the Bibles
of humanity would have no message of salvation.

XXXII. THE PROGRESS OF
CRIMINOLOGY

Published in the MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS for October,
1919.

IT is just thirty years ago since, in a rather youthful book
entitled The Criminal, I made an attempt to present to
English-speaking readers the main ideas of the then new and unknown
Italian school of criminal anthropology. Lombroso, as we know, was
the ardent and inspiring man of pioneering genius who created that
school. With a mind soaked in the conceptions of Darwinian
evolution, familiar also with exact anthropometry, and trained in
the latest methods of studying the insane, which he had himself
helped to initiate, he approached the criminal as no investigator
ever had, or ever could have, before. A dull, neglected, rather
disagreeable subject at once flashed, as at a magician's touch,
into vivid life. The study of the criminal became fascinating; it
suggested all sorts of attractive problems; it opened out the
horizon in many directions. When I first heard of this new
conception I could not rest until I had mastered all that the
Italians had done in this matter, and worked it into a connected
whole to enable English readers to share my own enjoyment.

This is a long time ago now. In those days it was not alone
intellectual enjoyment that Lom-broso aroused, but also furious
controversy. T had not put myself forward as a partisan of his
doctrines, and indeed I was scarcely entitled by adequate practical
knowledge to take any decisive part on one side or the other. (I
should not nowadays indeed venture to discuss at all a subject of
which I had so little first-hand knowledge.) I simply desired to
present for what it might be worth, a novel subject which had been
so interesting and stimulating to myself. Dr. Mercier in his recent
book, Crime and Criminals, states that I am "the only
devoted upholder" of the cult of Lombroso, at all events in
England; he brings forward no proof of this statement, nor am I
able to supply that deficiency. Lombroso founded a vigorous school
of investigators, but I have never formed part of it. I was merely
an outsider who enjoyed the spectacle. I realised the genuine vein
of genius in the man, I saw that he had revealed a new and
immensely fruitful field of study; but I was careful to point out
that a discoverer is by no means necessarily the best surveyor of
the land he reveals, and Columbus, as we know, mistook Cuba for
Japan.

How fruitful a region Lombroso had revealed, even if, as many
think, he was as wrong about it as Columbus was about Cuba, we
cannot now fail to recognise. A new era of investigation in these
and allied studies begins with Lombroso. He may be said to be the
first criminologist in the modern sense. A great stream of special
studies, inspired by Lombroso's ideas, began to pour forth, and
periodicals were founded for their reception. While these studies
had their original inspiration from Lombroso, they were often
undertaken by workers who were opposed, even bitterly hostile, to
Lombroso. Reputations have been made by writers whose whole
stock-in-trade has been the ideas of the Italian school which they
have sought to overthrow; they followed the lines of work
established by Lombroso. This opposition, while it has sometimes
been unreasonably acrimonious, has been fully justified because it
has made for the furtherance of research and the progress of
knowledge. By the vigorous opponents whom he called into existence
Lombroso advanced criminology at least as much as by the work of
his more immediate disciples. Even if we believe that there never
was any value in any of Lombroso's methods and ideas, it still
remains true that the vast field he thereby ploughed up has enabled
a whole army of excellent workers, who were not open to the charge
of being daring pioneers, to sow and to reap abundantly.

The immense stimulus which Lombroso imparted to criminology has,
however, long since been spent; he has passed into the serene
atmosphere of history and, except by a few ancient survivors of his
own epoch, his merits and his demerits are now discriminated with
calmness. The last belated sign of his influence was furnished by
the notable study of the English convict issued by Dr. Goring in
1913. Goring followed the laborious anthropometrical method of
approaching the study of criminals, and he went even beyond
Lombroso in emphasising the hereditary character of criminality,
for Lombroso took no such narrow view of the causation of crime,
but at the same time he ferociously attacked and misrepresented
Lombroso. The criminological outlook of to-day, while embodying
much that Lombroso fought for, has discarded most of his favourite
ideas, and no longer attaches much value to the anthropological
side of criminal study, dropping indeed altogether the term
"criminal anthropology."

The chief new stimulus to the study of the criminal in recent
years has come, as we might expect, from an entirely different
quarter. Lombroso was especially interested in the objective
physical stigmata of the criminal whom he approached from a
combined psychiatric and biological starting point. He was not
greatly concerned with investigating the psychic mechanism of
crime. The new psychological stimulus has largely come from Freud,
whose penetrative conceptions have extended to so many fields of
study. It is not to be understood that Freud himself has realised
this application of his method; in the wide-ranging schematic
exposition of the applications of psycho-analysis which he
published in Scientia in 1913 he made no reference at all to
criminology. Nor is it to be supposed that those criminologists who
have found these applications illuminating and helpful have been
strict and devoted Freudians; this, with one or two exceptions, is
distinctly not the case. It is notably not so with Dr. William
Healy, director of the Psychopathic Institute of the Chicago
Juvenile Court, who has most fruitfully applied to the
investigation and treatment of young criminals suggestions derived
from Freud. He rejects even the term "psychoanalysis," which at
first in (1915) he had accepted only with hesitation, and prefers
to speak of "mental analysis," partly because his method is not,
with technical strictness, that of psychoanalysis, and partly
because he has no wish to identify himself with a school. He is not
concerned with the general tendencies and characteristics of
Freud's body of doctrines; he cannot agree that sex is at the root
of all repressed psychic manifestations, since there are other
causes of emotional disturbance which strike deeply into the mental
organism, and he scoffs at sexual symbolisms. But while "not
concerned with general theories," his interest in psycho-analysis
was aroused by the "common-sense explanations and therapeutic
results it has given us." The main explanation in question is that
to understand all human behaviour we must seek the mental and
environmental experiences of early life, retracing the steps which
progressively formed the whole character. The Freudian method was
thus found to constitute a clue of the utmost value for students of
social misconduct. Nor was it so difficult to apply as Freud and
others had experienced in psycho-neurotic conditions, and the
therapeutic effects of the application of the method were found to
prove "in some instances nothing short of brilliant."

A great part of the interest of Healy's extensive work, The
Individual Delinquent (published in 1915), is due to the
application of mental analysis. This important work is, however, at
the same time a landmark in the progress of criminology. It is not
a comprehensive and concise treatise on criminology, and critics
have sometimes found it badly organised, ill-written, incomplete
and lacking in precision. Yet it is full of interest, of
instruction, of inspiration, the work of an investigator of
enormous experience and remarkable success among juvenile
offenders. It sets forth the great variety of types found among
such offenders, and it throws real and fresh light on the hidden
and often complex motives of their criminality. The attraction of
the book lies in the fact that we are here brought into the
presence of the criminal problem on its dynamic side. We watch a
skilful, enthusiastic, and energetic investigator in his
manipulation of a thousand young offenders, working out the varied
genesis and evolution of their criminal tendencies and often
successfully dissipating those tendencies. Criminology had never
before seemed so much alive or so complex; never before had it so
clearly appeared as a problem to be dealt with, not, as was once
thought, by punishment, but by skill.

The influence of Freud upon criminology, while clear in the
earlier work, is more fully and precisely shown in Healy's
subsequent special study of Mental Conflicts and Misconduct.
Freud and other psycho-analysists had emphasised the importance of
inner conflicts in producing various morbid changes, psychic and
physical, in the behaviour of the organism, and had shown what
beneficial results might be attained by the harmonious resolution
of such conflicts. Healy applied these results to the field of
criminology, and found that "the study of mental conflicts is a
scientific method of approaching certain problems of misconduct,
and that in this method lies the possibility of rendering great
human service." Among two thousand offenders investigated, in seven
per cent, the misconduct was definitely traceable to inner
conflict, while the real proportion was probably much larger. The
conflict usually dated from childhood, rarely or never later than
early adolescence, and the resulting misconduct assumed all sorts
of forms, and all degrees of gravity, from general troublesomeness
to sadistic cruelty and injury by violence. The heredity of these
offenders was not as a rule heavily charged with defects, and in
their intelligence, as well as in their general moral and emotional
character, they were decidedly higher and more refined than the
average of criminals. It was largely indeed in their moral
sensitiveness that the conflict arose, and their resulting offences
were often, as it were, outside their own natures, and committed in
spite of themselves. That is why the study and treatment of such
cases is so fruitful. For when the mechanism of inner conflict
resulting in external misconduct is carefully explored and finally
understood, and the subject appropriately treated, the outcome on
so good a soil is in at least some of the cases detailed by Healy
"immensely favourable." It is easy to see that a new light is
brought into the criminological field by such investigations as
these, and how greatly the possibilities, not only of moral
reconstruction generally, but of the practical and effective
treatment of criminals, are hereby furthered. It is not surprising
that under these new inspirations large horizons have seemed to
some to be opening out, not only for the benefit of criminals, but
for the whole of society. Thus Mr. Theodore Schroeder (in a lengthy
article in the Medico-Legal Journal for April, 1917),
approaching the subject not as a physician but as a lawyer,
declared that we now possess a general social psychological method
which, while it may best be begun and worked out in connexion with
the prison, is fitted for universal application. First must come
classification. On the basis of a physical examination all curable
physical evils must be discovered and relieved at the outset. Then
the subject is to be turned over to the psychological laboratory;
if there are any defects which may be regarded as congenital,
removed for special training, and if he is morbidly inefficient,
sent to some suitable institution. Among those now remaining in the
prison will be found the important group of recidivists who are
physically and mentally little below the average level. These
require careful study, for they are symptomatic of general
psycho-social disorder, and demand a sympathetic understanding. In
dealing with them, "the newly conceived need for reforming the
convict and restoring him to society replaces in our interest the
older idea of punishment." The secret of the social inadequacy of
these criminals is largely to be found in their emotional
attitudes, and therefore the importance of a psycho-analytic
department in every prison laboratory. If sexual taboos and
ignorances are found influential in determining the emotional
imperatives which lead to antisocial conduct, it becomes necessary
"to establish a technique for the conscious reconditioning of the
desires, so as to make them progressively more mature." Beyond this
is the possibility of a higher synthesis in unifying the measures
for the improvement of all our educational systems, so that we may
advance to the discovery of the factors in social psychology which
determine the criminal mind. Further, a technique should be
developed for class instruction, aiming to discover and eliminate
emotional conflicts, and to adapt the desires to more mature aims.
This involves a new sort of sex education, dealing with emotions
rather than with physical factors, a kind of hygiene needed at
least as much outside as inside prisons. As, indeed, we approach
the treatment of criminals with a larger vision, we shall find
ourselves anxious to help them, not alone for their own sakes, but
in a still higher degree as symptomatic products of unhealthy and
infantile stages in our psycho-social development as a whole. In
learning how to deal with the criminal we are learning how to deal
with society. It is well to select the criminal in the first place
simply because the so-called normal psyche can best be studied in
its exaggerations. The criminal should in this way be studied with
the desire to find out what is immature or inefficient in the human
factor of his larger environment. Thus it is that criminology leads
on to social psychology.

This conception is, however, that of a sanguine enthusiast, and
still lies far in the future. We shall not find it set forth in Dr.
Charles Mercier's Crime and Criminals, the most recent
English book on criminology, though, it may be added, the title of
criminologist is one which Dr. Mercier disclaims, or rather one
should say disdains. He brushes aside all the anatomists,
psychologists, anthropometricians, and statisticians who have
occupied themselves with crime or with criminals, and plants
himself on what he considers to be the quite different ground of
"common sense." From this foundation Dr. Mercier discusses various
criminological problems with much incisive energy and not a little
self-confident dogmatism. He adopts what used once to be considered
the typically English insular manner, which relies on native vigour
of thought, and ignores the foreigner, or, when he is too
conspicuous to be ignored, heaves half a brick at him. Naturally
Dr. Mercier is thus led into misrepresentation not only of others,
but also of himself. With a courageous air he puts forward as
original inspirations various excellent views which have long been
familiar, and often set forth by the despised criminologist. This
innocent consciousness of novelty adds to the interest, and
sometimes to the amusement, of Dr. Mercier's book. But he would
himself be the last to claim that it is a methodical and
comprehensive treatise on criminology.

For such a treatise we have to-day not far to look. Dr. Maurice
Parmelee, Professor of Sociology in the University of Missouri,
has, almost at the same time as Dr. Mercier's book appeared, put
forward a text-book of Criminology, which in its width of
range and in its adequacy to the present state of knowledge could
not well be improved. Dr. Parmelee cannot, indeed, compete with Dr.
Mercier in vigour of style or aptitude for picturesque
vituperation. But he possesses all the qualifications which Dr.
Mercier disdains: a wide knowledge of the literature of his
subject, personal experience of various aspects of it in several
countries, a sensitive receptivity combined with a definite and
broad outlook of his own, together with a singularly fair and
judicial mind which seldom fails to take into consideration both
sides of a question. It is in these qualities rather than in any
novelty of ideas that Professor Parme-lee's work has its main
value. To the English critic of the older school his attitude may
well seem too radical; he probes too deeply for the comfort of
those people who are content to live on the surface. Yet however,
they may have been moulded in passing through his mind, Parmalee's
ideas are in the main those which are now becoming generally
accepted among criminolo-gists. If it were not so this volume would
scarcely be a reliable text-book of the subject.

In accordance with the best general opinion among
criminologists, and avoiding the extremists at each end who regard
either heredity or economics as the sole sufficing cause, Parmelee
believes that the factors of crime are in part internal and in part
external. There is no specific instinct of crime; the motives of
crime are ordinary human motives, although marked by abnormal
strength, or more often by abnormal weakness of their inhibiting or
controlling impulses. There is, therefore, no hard and fast line
between criminals and the ordinary population. Classification still
remains desirable, because it is useful in planning the treatment
of criminals, but is still difficult because there are gradations
between the different types. Parmelee proposes five classes or
types into which it seems to him that criminals tend to fall: (1)
the criminal ament or feeble-minded criminal; (2) the psychopathic
criminal; (3) the professional criminal; (4) the occasional
criminal, with the two sub-groups of (a) accidental criminal and
(b) criminal by passion; (5) the evolutive criminal with the
sub-group of the political criminal. The majority of
criminals—it may even be 80 per cent.—belong to the
professional and occasional groups, but the first group is the most
significant, because it includes those criminals formerly called
"born criminals" or "instinctive criminals," around whom so many
battles have been fought in the past. No doubt it is best to
describe them under some such heading as Dr. Parmelee sets up. They
probably constitute only about 5 to 10 per cent, (though so high an
authority as Goddard makes it at least 50 per cent.) of criminals,
but even that is a proportion from ten to twenty times higher than
among the general population, and this group is that to which
belong those typical monsters of crime which most impress the
popular imagination. At the other end, with the "evolutive"
criminals, we are among the highest intellectual and moral
individuals whom it is possible to class as criminals. Their
motives are not, like those of the common criminal, anti-social,
but social. They are protesting against an ill-adjusted condition
of society and working towards a better society. They should,
Professor Parmelee argues, be brought before a special tribunal.
The maladjustment of society and the failure of rigid institutions
to keep pace with democratic development is regarded as a source
even of common crime. Such mal-adjustment is apt to be caused by a
too rapid growth of the population, leading to an intensified
struggle for existence and general evil social conditions, and
Professor Parmelee urges "the supreme importance for the prevention
of crime of the intelligent use of birth-control measures." In the
section on Criminal Jurisprudence and Penology he discusses all the
details of the administration of justice, and indicates the
probable line of future reform, insisting, like most recent
crimiuologists, on individualisation of treatment. He believes in a
reasonable combination of the good points of the English and French
systems. It is probable that juries will for most purposes
ultimately be abolished, as the conditions under which they
performed a valuable function are now passing away, while judges
will receive a more special training for their tasks; the partisan
medico-legal witness is doomed, and, even with trained and
impartial experts, there should be a medico-legal court of appeal.
A public defender also seems called for as well as a public
prosecutor. We cannot expect, however, that the best methods of
administering justice, the most humanitarian treatment of the
criminal, or the most favourable social conditions, will ever
entirely do away with crime. Even eugenic measures (about which
Parmelee is scarcely hopeful at all) can at most remove some
factors only of criminality. Goddard, who speaks with authority as
the Research Director of the Vineland Training School, considers
that, since at least two-thirds of mental defectives have inherited
their defects, feeblemindedness as related to crime might be
exterminated if we set our minds to the task. But Raymond Pearl,
from the scientific biometrical side, has lately stated his belief
that the difficulties are considerable and that many years would be
needed for the task. It is not, however, only along the line of
heredity that we may look for progress, but also along that of
social environment. The problem of crime is one of expansion as
well as of repression. The roots of criminality go deep into the
structure of society, and in working for social freedom and
equality, for the wholesome enlargement of society, we are also
indirectly working for the abolition of crime. Human spontaneity is
still limited far more than is desirable or necessary for social
welfare. The special tasks of decreasing crime are thus finally
merged in the larger task of increasing the scope of the normal
life, or, as Parmelee would term it, that spontaneous expression of
human nature on the widest basis in which civilization
consists.

SECOND SERIES 1920-1932

Havelock Ellis, 1932

I. LIFE IN ATHENS

This paper was published in the NATION, 17th April 1920.

IN Athens, as elsewhere in Europe, the war has left its mark.
Everything is dear—the Athenians complacently declare that
theirs is the dearest city in Europe—and the exchange, which
had been rather artificially kept up, has at last dropped rapidly.
In Athens, also, as elsewhere, a new rich class has come to the
front, anxiously engaged, the Greeks say, in manicuring its coarse
hands and invading the most select resorts of Athenian society. The
delay in demobilising the army has caused scarcity of labour; it is
cheaper to import potatoes from Holland than to grow them at home;
the balance of imports and exports is heavily on the wrong side. At
the same time, trains and trams are even more overcrowded than in
London, and it is difficult to find a place to live in, so that
hotels, however expensive, are crowded by Greeks.

With all this, Greece is gathering in the profits of her
junction, however late, with the Allies. Maps are hung up outside
the booksellers' shops, to be eagerly examined by intelligent
people of all classes, anxious to know where those Greeks live who
have now been restored to a fatherland which had never heard of
them. The followers of the astute Venezelos in the Greek Parliament
can triumphantly retort on his carping critics, and the portrait of
Löyd-Tzorgz occupies an honoured place beside the new map. When I
left Athens at the end of March, preparations were being made for a
great celebration of the New Greece, with a brilliant illumination
of the badly lighted streets, and salvos of artillery and public
prayer. It only awaited the return of Venezelos from London. So it
was really the same drama that was being staged in other countries
more familiar to us. Only here the tragedy of the world seemed to
be enacted, in a more playful manner, around more trivial
incidents: Parliament was chiefly occupied when I was there over
the introduction of a Bill to raise the price of newspapers from a
penny to three halfpence. Moreover, as compared with Italy and
still more with France, where conditions are now so hard, life is
easy; there are no abnormal restrictions, and in spite of high
prices most kinds of food are plentiful. Then there was, too, the
background. The solemnity of the ancient traditions heightened the
gaiety of their modern successors, and to the Northerner the
surprise of the radiancy of southern Nature, in the long intervals
between gales as fierce as those of London, combined in the total
impression. Here amid the flowers and birds in the leafy walks of
the Palace Garden one could realise, two months ahead, the rural
delights of England, and on the rocky slopes of ancient heights,
amid the wild oats and barley in ear, bloomed rich crimson poppies
one could never expect to see in the harvest-fields at home. In
this version and on this stage the tragedy of the world could be
witnessed with a lighter heart than in the more sombre northern
theatre. So that on being landed by an almost miraculous Fate at
the Piraeus, I heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction.

It has been usual, even from ancient times, to speak evil of the
Greek. The European business man (the Greeks often speak distantly
of "Europe" as a place outside Greece) can seldom say too much evil
of the Greek, though he is sometimes careful to place his stigma on
the Greek of the Levant. Those who have had dealings with both
Greeks and Turks always conclude in favour of the Turks. The
captains of the ships that frequent the Mediterranean declare that
nowhere do they encounter so much trouble and theft as at the
Piraeus. It may be so. Yet all kinds of people go to make up a
nation, and during a month in Greece I encountered no kind or
degree of dishonesty worth serious complaint; cabmen and boatmen
are, indeed, shamelessly extortionate—but that is the case
everywhere—and so are hotel-keepers, but they may be said to
have entered the respectable class of profiteers. The Greeks are no
doubt commercially-minded, but they are not usually rapacious.
Indeed, in all classes and occupations they are singularly free
from any impulse to push themselves forward or to attract
attention. They are not effusive or officious or obsequious; they
regard themselves as democrats, they incline to avoid saying "Thank
you," and scarcely seem to have any equivalent for the common
"Sorry" of our London traffic. The Greek is by no means offensive,
and he sees no need to apologise where clearly no offence was
intended. That attitude seems characteristic of the Greek, and is
certainly grateful to the tourist, though, since his special needs
are ignored, the foreigner cannot easily make his way without a
little knowledge of Greek. Not that there are many tourists in
Athens. I only came across a single authentic specimen with a
guidebook, and there was one painter at work, a Frenchman;
miscellaneous parties from ships that call at the Piraeus spend a
few hours strolling through the streets, and there are English
families settled in Athens for business or work; but the Museums
are mostly deserted save by a few straggling Greeks. The Greek has
an easy and instinctive impulse of equality, a temperamental
dislike of excess. Whatever poverty there may be in Athens, one
misses its wretchedness, and whatever wealth the war may have
brought, one fails to see its ostentation. At a quarter to eight
the members come cheerfully trooping down the steps of the House of
Parliament for dinner, mostly leaving on foot. It is the trains and
the trams that are overcrowded; other vehicles are few; and one can
enjoy the pleasure, rare in a capital city, of strolling along in
the middle of the road, provided one preserves an eye for rare
motor-cars, for these in Athens are recklessly and unskilfully
driven, though the foot-passenger may console himself that they
prove chiefly dangerous to themselves. Diligent exploration of the
Athenian restaurants, again, reveals a singular general uniformity,
although with slight individual shades of difference, and the
prices marked on the "Catalogue of Foods" vary within the narrowest
limits. I had more than once visited the most fashionable
restaurant in Athens before any suspicion of its select character
crossed my mind. In all things the Athenian avoids excess or
ostentation; he is cheerful, temperate, moderate, reasonable. His
supreme and instinctive virtue is sophrosyne.

It is for this reason, no doubt, that the Greeks, however
amiable, are not an interesting people. Anyone who has been
accustomed to watch the people of France or Spain, each so
absorbingly interesting in its own way, or even the amusing
populace of Italy, can find little of interest in Greece, however
attractive we may consider its charming children, its ingenuous
boys, its beautiful-browed girls, the dignified independence of its
old peasant men and women. The reason is simple. Whatever opinion
we may hold as to the continuity in Greece of the ancient Greek
spirit, it is certain that in form the ancient traditions have been
broken and lost, so that the Greek people have in manner and
customs become crystallised afresh on a modern pattern, related to
the ancient, yet different, precisely as Athens itself has slowly
shifted northward and eastward during the past two thousand years
to a less-encumbered site, and has grown up anew, a little French
in character, a little German—a miniature Munich surrounded
by a wide, ragged border of ruins and hovels.

The great waves of invasion that have swept over Greece have
left the sedimentary traces of their passing, notably those of the
Slavs and the Turks, not to mention the powerful but less coloured
permeation by the Albanians. So that to-day, by innumerable little
traits, we are reminded, now of Moscow, now of Constantinople. The
Greeks drink coffee in the Turkish way and tea in the Russian way,
and that fact is symbolic of a large part of their life. As might
be expected, it is the Turkish element that is most obvious, and
the delightful old Bazaar beside the Stoa of Hadrian is genuinely
Oriental in form and spirit. It is certainly well to remember that
the influences that have swept over this region have largely moved
in a circle. Some scholars tell us that we can best form an idea of
the life of ancient Athens from Cairo or Tunis. When the Turks,
enriched by Byzantine culture, overran the land, Greece was merely
Islamised by an influence that had already been doubly Hellenised,
so that, however it may be with the old spirit, the old forms have
been perpetuated.

Yet, however ancient its sophrosynic temperament, or however
lacking in aboriginal interest—one may accept either
alternative, or perhaps both—Athens as a modern city still
has its own character. I should be inclined to say that this lay,
most obviously, in a widespread taste for the little refinements of
life. I have quoted the Athenian humorous complaint concerning the
new profiteers who manicure their rough hands and resort to the
fashionable pastry-cook shops. It is significant in its revelation
of the Greek ideal. (How ancient this ideal of refinement,
Athenaeus bears witness.) It has nothing to do with a sense for
art. There is little art among the Athenians: they have quite a
pretty taste in imitating classic architecture, and that seems all;
there is no sculpture of any account, and no painting or music;
while one would be puzzled to name any Greek writer in his own
language who has attained European fame as poet or novelist. So
that, unlike their ancient predecessors, the modern Greeks have no
occasion in the exercise of a wise moderation to administer hemlock
to a too prominent philosopher or to leave an outstanding sculptor
languishing in prison. And if one goes, as one always should, to
the Market, to learn the natural and spontaneous feeling for art of
a people, I know no Market in Europe so sordid, ugly, loathsome, as
that of Athens, while the mirrors and bad pictures with which even
in poor quarters the walls of butchers' shops are unhappily adorned
scarcely redeem the Market. Nor, again, is this taste for
refinement due to any obvious predominance of women. On the
contrary, even with a mobilised army, women are singularly little
in evidence in the public places of Athens—an Oriental trait
not to be accounted for by the well-known greater relative
birthrate of males in Greece than in any other country.

Yet hairdressers abound in all quarters, as well as large
flourishing shops of perfumers, with their allies the chemists;
flower-shops are numerous and elaborately arranged, while
flower-sellers come round the restaurant tables and not in vain.
Boot-blacking establishments and boot-black boys are everywhere,
for the Athenian is attentive to his feet; he will draw out his
handkerchief after a shower and pause on the pavement to apply it
to his boots; at the doors of restaurants and hotels a small boy is
placed with a feather-brush to perform the same duties; and there
are a prodigious number of shoe-shops displaying fashionable
footwear all over them, inside and out. The modern Athenian shop,
it may be noted, is admirably designed, a spacious, square, lofty,
panelled hall, little encumbered by counters, and with its wares
attractively exposed up the walls. I specially noted the
well-equipped and intelligently served cosmopolitan
book-shops—one would be glad to see their like in
London—where the volume one asks for, even though it can
scarcely be often in demand, is in a few moments brought trippingly
forward by a smiling youth or girl. This widespread Athenian taste
for the refinements of life seems to be typified in the rows of
elegant little pepper trees planted along the streets wherever
there is room for them, to make a delicate pattern against the
sky.

It is the sky, after all, which is the supreme refinement of
Attica, and, whatever else may or may not be classic, its most
indubitably ancient possession. We have been taught for a century
past that the classic Greek has disappeared from Attica. The
doctrine is perhaps overdone; there are certainly many varied types
here, and it is difficult not to believe that Greek blood and Greek
influence still persist; many an old peasant with his almost
frizzly hair and the special curves of his wrinkles seems to bring
ancient busts vividly to life. However that may be, there can be no
dispute about the atmosphere. There are no nightingales now on
Kolonus; Plato might be puzzled to find the grove of Akademe; there
is little temptation to lie on the banks of Ilissus, and the
vase-painters who sketched the Fount of Kallirrhoë would scarcely
recognise the dirty pool where washerwomen pursue their labours.
But this rugged and arid land, sprinkled strangely with gay
flowers, is still bathed as of old in a singularly lovely
atmosphere. It is not one of deep or violent colour. There is
always a little moisture in this maritime air, and the light,
however clear to our Northern eyes, is tender and soft, luminous by
day and by night, delicately tinctured at sunset or dawn, a radiant
garment that is but rarely obscured. When, after sunrise, we
approach the Piraeus from the sea, and the two tall black factory
chimneys in the foreground weave a delicate garland of smoke for
the distant city—violet-wreathed, they would call it of
old—our first impression is of this lovely atmosphere. It may
well be the last that remains with us.

II. THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

This review of Professor Bury's book, THE IDEA OF PROGRESS:
AN INQUIRY INTO ITS ORIGIN AND GROWTH, appeared in the NATION, 22nd
May 1920. I may mention that the germ of my observations here on
the idea of Progress can be found in the Preface, written before
the war, to THE TASK of SOCIAL HYGIENE (1912).

PROFESSOR BURY, as we know, is the distinguished historian of
Greece and the later Roman Empire, the editor of Gibbon, and the
organiser of the forthcoming Cambridge Ancient History. He has also
occupied himself with the history of thought, especially in what
may be termed its rationalistic aspects, and his little History
of Free Thought is a widely known popular handbook. It would
not be easy to find anyone better equipped to set forth the history
of the idea of Progress.

The idea of Progress, it is true, is an idea which the serious
thinker—unless he has committed himself to the construction
of a philosophic system of human perfectibility—only uses
with precaution and many qualifications. But the multitude are not
serious thinkers, and the idea of Progress involves a doctrine so
comfortable to the average man, it lends itself so well to moods of
self-complacency, and it apparently involves so little mental
effort to understand, that it has become the most generally useful
tool in the cheap rhetorician's bag, equally applicable to all
audiences. When circumstances arise which render it less easy than
usual to apply this convenient tool, the rhetorician and his
audience are alike a little disconcerted, and fumble around
awkwardly for something that they vaguely miss. Such circumstances
have, as we know, arisen lately. So Professor Bury could not have
chosen a better moment to put forth his book, which is all the more
welcome since it is the first serious attempt in English to deal
with its subject.

Progress, as we scarcely realise, is an entirely modern idea,
scarcely two centuries old, though when it had once been grasped it
rapidly gained favour and had its great flourishing time during the
nineteenth century. The ancients knew nothing of it. Seneca
alone—and it is a significant fact that he was one of the
most ostentatiously rhetorical of classic authors—set forth
his faith in a great future of constantly growing knowledge and
endless discovery. Indeed, his conception of Progress was somewhat
more comprehensive than that of most of its modern apostles, for he
added: "Are you surprised to be told that human knowledge has not
completed its task? Why, human wickedness has not yet fully
developed!" But for the most part the idea of Progress was not only
unknown to the classic world, it was opposed to its whole spirit.
There was indeed no lack of progressive men or of the progressive
spirit; mankind has never made such marvellous, manifold, and
sudden progress in a single century as the Greeks of the Periclean
Age witnessed. But the Greeks themselves distinguished the
development of mere material and social improvement from their
deeper religious and philosophic conception of the nature of the
world as gradually receding from an original "Golden Age" of divine
simplicity. So far from progress, there was, therefore, regress in
the quality of the world. This conception furnished an inevitable
prejudice in favour of social conservatism—often enough
overcome in actual practice—but it helped the Ancient World
to attain its serene and unequalled insight into the essential
facts of life and saved it from the antics of arrogant
self-complacency.

With the conquest of Christianity there was a total change in
the spiritual atmosphere. Yet it remained even more unfavourable
for the idea of Progress. There was still a primitive Golden Age of
simplicity from which Man had fallen, and the road of any advance
towards a great future on earth was effectually barred by setting
up a great future in another world, only to be won by the efforts
of the individual soul in detaching himself from this present base
world and disinteresting himself of its concerns, present or
future; there might also be a millennium on earth, but that would
not be brought about by Man, but only by Divine fiat. The idea of
Progress could not possibly arise if the world was in the last
stages of degeneration and ready to be destroyed at any moment. The
idea of an intervening Providence, which came in to support this
conception, was also scarcely compatible with any idea of Progress,
and the further subsidiary principle of ecclesiastical authority
was actively hostile to it. This principle of authority, extended
to the classic authors whose superiority to those of mediaeval
times could not fail to be recognised, not only stood in the way of
any idea of Progress, but impeded Progress itself. There was indeed
Roger Bacon, but, as Professor Bury makes clear, it is a mistake to
associate that wonderful Franciscan friar with the idea of
Progress, for, though he boldly asserted the claims of direct
experiment in science, he retained the fundamental ideas of his
time.

The Renaissance, so great an age of Progress, the age of a
thinker like Leonardo da Vinci, whose vision penetrated to the
farthest distance ever granted to men, effected nothing for the
idea of Progress. It was indeed more unfavourable than even
Christianity to any such idea, for it was based on a new veneration
for the ancients as the great founts of Art and Knowledge.

It was, however, the spirit introduced by the Renaissance which
was destined in the end to prepare the way for the idea of
Progress. Authority—the authority of the past—had
become the chief obstacle to the emergence of such an idea. But to
enter fully into the spirit of the ancients, as the Renaissance men
were at last able to do, was to reject the principle of authority
and to turn to Nature. The last stage of the Renaissance, which may
be said to end in the early part of the seventeenth century, was
thus decisive for the history of the idea of Progress.

Bodin and Le Roy prepared the way by introducing more rational
conceptions of universal history, thereby casting aside the
lingering belief in a primitive Golden Age and discrediting the
notion of the gradual deterioration of the world. Francis Bacon
also came forward with his magnificent message of augmented
knowledge in a Great Renovation. But it was Descartes who, more
than any other man, made possible the idea of Progress.

Professor Bury points out that this idea is peculiarly French.
Not only in it full-blown shape but even in its early germ it grew
up on French soil. There is no more essential expression of the
French spirit than Cartesianism. It was out of the spirit of
Descartes, the most transforming influence on thought the
seventeenth century produced, and out of Cartesianism, which was
"equivalent to a Declaration of the Independence of Man," that the
theory of Progress was developed. Cautious though he was about the
particular applications of his principles, Descartes cleared out of
the way the whole intellectual edifice of the past with his two
fundamental axioms: the supremacy of reason and the invariability
of natural law. He believed, moreover, that the advance of
knowledge involved moral advance, and he had at first proposed to
call his Discourse on Method "the Project of a Universal
Science which can elevate our Nature to its highest degree of
Perfection." The absolute authority of tradition was now
overthrown; it began to occur to many that the "ancients," after
all, belonged to the childhood of the race, and that it is to the
moderns that the title "ancient" more properly belongs. The earlier
Cartesians hesitated to push the doctrine of Progress to an
extreme. The wise Fontenelle, who developed it admirably on the
intellectual side, not only admitted that there might be breaks in
the advance of knowledge, but refused to extend the idea of
Progress to morals, since the heart of Man does not change with the
fashions of his mind. But the younger Cartesians were more
adventurous. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre, above all, with his
exuberant and extravagantly sanguine temperament, throwing out the
seeds of new projects, sometimes fruitful, sometimes sterile and
absurd, on every side, definitely carried the idea of Progress from
the scientific sphere into morals and society, so becoming a leader
in the great revolutionary movement of the eighteenth century. He
it was who first loudly proclaimed the new creed of Man's
indefinite progress in all directions. After that there was little
more to do than to elaborate and intensify that creed. This was
mainly done by the French encyclopaedists—though Diderot saw
too many of the aspects of Nature to be unduly carried away by the
new doctrine—and the distinguished thinkers more or less
associated with them, such as Condorcet, Holbach, and Helvétius.
Then, in the nineteenth century, the idea of Progress received a
new and powerful impetus by being incorporated into Anarchism by
Godwin and his disciple Shelley, "the poet of perfectibility," and
into Socialism by Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Marx.

Finally came Comte, who, in laying the foundations of sociology,
sought to make the idea of Progress its regulative principle, and
Herbert Spencer, the philosopher of evolution, who adopted the
theory of the transmissibility of acquired characters and
postulated an ever-increasing harmony between Man and his
environment, so developing the idea of Progress to its last limits;
it was largely his wide influence which spread abroad the
comfortable though not altogether legitimate notion that Evolution
and Progress are one.

In his broad and admirable presentation of this important
chapter in the history of human ideals, Professor Bury throughout
holds the balance even. He presents the idea of Progress with
sympathy, almost with enthusiasm, but at the same time he preserves
an attitude of genial scepticism. Faith in Progress, he states, is
like any other faith—faith in Providence or faith in personal
immortality. You are free to accept it or to reject it, but you
cannot cither prove it or disprove it. His own personal attitude
may nevertheless be divined. He refers in one place, rather
vaguely, to Mr. Balfour's Inaugural Address at Glasgow in 1891 as
never having been answered, and in that slight but cogent
discussion of Progress, it may be recalled, Mr. Balfour not only
pointed out that the best efforts of Man have not been inspired by
any faith in a millennium, but definitely disavowed belief in any
such future, only admitting improvement in the human environment,
and that by constant effort and not by inevitable fate. It is true
that Professor Bury dedicates his History to the memory of
Saint-Pierre, Condorcet, Comte, Spencer, "and other optimists
mentioned in this volume." But should this message reach the abode
of those august Shades they will be well advised not to look beyond
the Dedication. For if Saint-Pierre, for instance, still
impulsively sanguine, should eagerly turn to the chapter which
bears his name, he will find it set down among the flowers
scattered over his memory that he was unphilosophical, superficial,
narrow, almost naïf, and a little vulgar. There is perhaps a
touch of irony in this use of the word "optimist," more than once
occurring in the volume, for Professor Bury cannot fail to be aware
that it is scarcely legitimate. A man is an optimist or a pessimist
not by his opinions concerning the fate of the world in some
indefinitely remote future, but by his estimate of the value of
life here and now. No view regarding the ultimate future is
incompatible with optimism, and when Whitman declared that "There
will never be any more perfection than there is now," he would have
been surprised to learn that he was a pessimist. If the great
spirits of antiquity were all pessimists, the name becomes a title
of honour; and though there may be some grounds for regarding
Christianity as a pessimistic religion, Christians have never
accepted the appellation. It is, indeed, a little futile to apply
the label of pessimism to everyone who had the misfortune to be
born before the eighteenth century, however glorious we may reckon
that century to be.

Professor Bury's book is, as he is careful to point out, "a
purely historical inquiry," and involves no judgment on the general
validity of the idea of Progress. In unrolling the historical
picture he is compelled to glide without a qualm from one to
another of the most disparate aspects of the idea. It is evident
that, valuable as it is, such a book as this needs to be
supplemented by another, setting forth an analysis of the idea of
Progress. Progress in the lump, rolling in all directions at once,
with the varying impetus which generations of totally unlike
people—Materialists and Idealists, Christians and Agnostics,
Individualists and Socialists—have imparted to it, is an
impossible monster. It may well be said that the acceptance of the
idea of it is "an act of faith." Even the pedestrian metaphor
involved in the very name of "Progress" suggests a more rational
conception. We cannot "walk forward" anywhere without
discrimination; we must needs leave much that we cherish behind; we
must needs reject many excellent paths when we choose one. If we
break up the idea of Progress, we may find it consist of components
with widely varying degrees of validity. Elie Faure, a critic of
penetrating though often disorderly insight, writing on
civilisation in a book La Danse sur le Feu et l'eau, which
is of even more recent appearance than Professor Bury's, recognises
three main possible forms of progress—aesthetic, moral, and
scientific—of which the last is alone undeniable without any
act of faith. It is, at the same time, he points out, the only one
which is limited to the construction of a tool, a tool certainly
that may be used to great ends, yet still worth no more than the
men who use it. Instead of the word "Progress" Faure would prefer
the more precise expression, "the realisation of a new
equilibrium," which allows for varying differences in the quality
of the ages, the nineteenth century being, in Faure's opinion,
"without doubt one of the least civilised in History."

Although Professor Bury insists on the preoccupation of the
French with the idea of Progress, he makes no mention of Remy de
Gourmont's pregnant conception of "the law of intellectual
constancy"—accepted as probable by so distinguished a thinker
as Jules de Gaultier—according to which every species is
provided with only a limited and constant power, the nature of its
achievements being conditioned by the environmental level on which
it happens to be placed. That view is supported by the recent
tendency of anthropologists to recognise that what we regard as the
modern species of Man really existed at a vastly remote epoch, with
just the same physical conformation and the same brain capacity as
he possesses to-day. So also it is with a civilisation or, as Faure
would call it, the style of a people. A civilisation is not
indefinitely modifiable, and when it is unable to struggle with
hostile conditions it gives place to another more apt, but
springing, not from itself, though some of its achievements may be
handed on, but from an originally lower human level. The conditions
of the present age favour the contact of civilisations, but it is
not clear that the result is a new style; it may only be a chaotic
confusion of styles.

Putting aside these considerations, and returning to the
historical standpoint, it is plausible to hold with Professor Bury
that "the animating and controlling idea of western civilisation,"
during the latest small period of the world's history culminating
in the Great War, has been the idea of Progress. Whether it will
continue to be so we cannot tell. Professor Bury suggests that the
idea of Progress, adopted in a certain not very advanced stage of
civilisation, itself involves its own supersession, when a new idea
will usurp its place in the direction of humanity. What idea the
Protean and infinitely rich spirit of Man may thus put forth, he
wisely neglects to indicate.

III. THE WORLD'S RACIAL
PROBLEM

This review of Dr. Lothrop Stoddard's THE RISING TIDE OF
COLOUR, published in New York, appeared in the NATION, llth July
1920.

THE expansion of the White race during the period between the
discovery of America and the Russo-Japanese War is the leading fact
in the recorded history of Man. At first mainly confined to a small
corner of the continental earth mass, this race now occupies
four-tenths of the entire habitable land-area of the globe, while
nearly nine-tenths of the whole area are under its political
control; almost one-third of the human beings on earth to-day are
Whites; they have become the most numerous branch of the human
species. Such a situation—impossible even to conceive five
hundred years ago—has, so far as we know, never occurred
before.

Had the wisdom of the White race been equal to its strength and
to its extravagant procreative activity, this situation, however
extraordinary, would still not have involved any crucial race
problem for the world. It would have been a problem for individual
peoples here and there, a problem of which they would no doubt
sometimes have died, as now happens, while yet the main change of
balance might have been effected without great upheavals or
permanent friction. But the White race has not been conspicuous for
wisdom in the sphere of world politics; its civilisation has been
too materialistic—"one-sided, abnormal, unhealthy," in the
words of Dr. Stoddard—and hence it is that in this twentieth
century the world is faced by what the author of this book calls
the "Crisis of the Ages."

Dr. Stoddard is an American, a graduate of Harvard, and a
citizen of New York, and like many Americans, aware that they have
to attract the attention of a vast hustling audience absorbed in
its own activities over an enormous area, he is inclined to address
it through a megaphone, in the strong, simple, emphatic language
that instrument demands. His message has thus to be a little
discounted, but even when that allowance is made, it remains a
message it concerns us to hear, and it is delivered with force and
knowledge. It is well to remember that his conclusions are, after
all, fundamentally in harmony with those of sober and judicial
observers in Europe; it is enough to mention Professor Demangeon's
recent book, Le Déclin de l'Europe. Dr. Stoddard makes no
claim to be a man of science, and on that account, for the
Introduction to his book, he calls on Mr. Madison Grant, who is
closely in touch with biology, geography, and anthropology, but
here makes some rather disputable statements. The author of the
book regards himself simply as a student of world politics. In that
capacity he has already published some notable writings on the
wider aspects of the Great War as well as a purely historical study
of The French Revolution in San Domingo, which he regards as
a prologue to the mighty drama of our own day, the first real shock
between the ideals of White supremacy and race equality. His
weakness, as has already been hinted, is a tendency to
over-statement, a tendency which will unduly imperil the success of
his thesis in the judgment of many. Is is thus that he lays so much
stress on the Nordic peoples of Europe that he would seem at times
to regard them as the only valuable element in Europe. That would
be a shallow and even false view. The Nordic peoples, or fair
long-heads, are widely regarded as simply an early off-shoot of the
Mediterranean peoples, the dark long-heads, while the third
remaining element in Europe, the Alpine roundheads, is so closely
associated and blended with the other two, that we need not view
with too much alarm any forecasts of the fate of the unmixed
Nordics, who are likely at all events to survive in combinations
which, on the Mendelian principles our author accepts, will
preserve their qualities intact. In the same way Dr. Stoddard makes
here and there considerable play with the bogey of Bolshevism. That
also may be premature, for we do not yet know whether the
Bolshevist impulse will survive, and we do not know whether if it
survives it will be altogether transmuted or continue in its
original form; nor do we know, in the last case, whether it will
mean regress or a new and fruitful progress. To describe it as "the
arch enemy of civilisation and the race" is, at the present stage,
merely the vanity of ignorance.

Dr. Stoddard's strength lies, however, in a department where
most of us are weak. He has a close grip of world politics; his
outlook is wide; he has a detailed knowledge of racial problems and
racial propaganda all over the world. He is one of the first to
realise comprehensively the fateful bearing of the Great War on the
larger problems of the world. He became convinced more than ten
years ago that it is upon the quality of human life that all
else depends, and that the keynote of twentieth-century
world-politics would be the relation between the primary human
races, White and Coloured, so that he comes before us well prepared
to analyse the various aspects of that relation, "whose importance
for the future of mankind," he declares, "far transcends the
questions which engross its attention to-day."

The war, and still more the "peace," have been potent in
stirring these problems into acute activity, but it would be a
mistake to suppose that either the one or the other generated them.
They were bound to arise sooner or later and were becoming active
years before the war. There had indeed for a long time been a slow
educational process at work among the Coloured races of the world,
a process in part imitative of the White world and in part
critical, but in both aspects leading to an unrest which was
further stimulated by the White world's attitude of haughty and
domineering superiority. The reality of that superiority was,
however sullenly, still accepted even as recently as 1904. Then it
was that the Russo-Japanese War effected a complete revolution in
the Coloured mind, primarily in Asia and secondarily everywhere.
Its momentous character, Dr. Stoddard believes, is not even now
fully appreciated. Before that war ideas of revolt had been
seething half-unconsciously in millions of Coloured minds. But
henceforth those ideas were clarified and dramatised; a new joy and
hope thrilled through Coloured veins, and the legend of White
invincibility lay henceforth, a shattered idol, in the dust. Yet it
was still possible, and even imperative, to feel high respect for
White power and White civilisation. But then, ten years later, came
the Great War, and the work of destruction was completed. The White
race was exhibited before the whole world engaged in a fratricidal
conflict of the most ruthless and inhuman kind that could be
conceived, and the lesson was not lost on the Coloured spectators.
It was the less likely to be lost since they were themselves in
part forced to take a hand in it by their maddened and blinded
White masters. They were trained and encouraged to conquer and
destroy the White man by his own methods; they were brought
wholesale over to Europe into the closest contact with White
civilisation, and shown its hollowness and its shams. No wonder
that the seeds have all been sown which are now germinating, and
promising a sad harvest for the White man to be the reaper of, or
rather, our author suggests, to be the reaped.

The Coloured world has missed nothing of the spectacle, but has
followed it all with the most intelligent interest. A large part of
this volume is given up to detailed exposition of the racial
situation to-day among the four great main divisions of the
Coloured population of the world—Yellow, Brown, Red, and
Black. These four chapters are full of instruction regarding the
present attitude and aspirations of the peoples in question as
witnessed by their most conspicuous spokesmen. Everywhere we see
the same Renascence, the outcome of the pregnant events of the past
fifteen years, in energetic reaction against White domination. It
is the Yellow race, led by Japan, already master of all the
scientific secrets of the West, and the Brown race of the Nearer
East, in which ferments the forceful and ever-expanding leaven of
Islam, that are the protagonists of this Renascence. The Black
peoples, however restless and discontented, are comparatively
inoffensive and in any case easy to placate, while the American
Indians are a small and diminishing race. But the Yellow and Brown
peoples are not only by far the most capable, they are also by far
the most numerous. They already outnumber the Whites by nearly two
to one, and at the present time they are expanding at a more rapid
rate. This result has been largely brought, about by White
domination, putting down local wars, combating epidemic disease,
and improving the food supply. "That this profound Asiatic
renaissance will eventually result in the substantial elimination
of White political control from Anatolia to the Philippines is as
natural as it is inevitable."

Looking at the matter, as Dr. Stoddard looks at it, from the
White and more especially the Nordic standpoint, which is that of
England even more than of America, the danger that menaces our
position in the immediate future, and our very existence in the
more remote future, is threefold: the peril of arms, the peril of
markets, and the peril of migrations. The Coloured military peril,
the author thinks, is often exaggerated, though he is careful to
add that exact forecast is impossible. The Japanese have become the
approved match of a Western power alike on land and sea, and though
the Chinese are pacific they have had their bellicose moments and
might easily again, especially under the leadership of Japan, which
would then become by far the mightiest military power in the world.
The industrial menace to the White world, already foreseen by
Pearson thirty years ago, is a more certain danger, likely to act
partly by the development of the world's natural resources,
destroying the White man's chief present source of prosperity, and
partly by a deliberate resolve of the exasperated Coloured peoples
to boycott White industrial activities. Most potent of all these
dangers, however, is migration. For a long time past the Coloured
world has been pressing on the domain held, but by no means always
utilised, by the White world, which is frequently even
constitutionally incapable of utilising them. Natural expansion and
human justice imperatively demand such migrations. The White
barriers built to hold them back are completely artificial. The
White labourer can nowhere, absolutely nowhere—Dr.
Stoddard is here even more than usually emphatic—compete with
the Coloured labourer. The more we approach to Democracy, to the
supremacy of Labour, to the Directorate of the Proletariat, the
more inevitable we are rendering the Dictatorship of the Coloured
man and his right to settle where he will. Yet "such migrations
upset standards, sterilise better stocks, increase low types, and
compromise national futures more than war, revolutions, or native
deterioration." The author brings forward the examples of Natal,
Mauritius, and Hawaii, new outposts of Asia, which indicate the
directions in which the rising tide of Colour is flowing.

Dr. Stoddard possesses, however, all the temperamental optimism
and self-confidence of the White Nordic man, whose champion he
remains throughout. He refuses even to consider whether it is
reasonable to expect that a race which has only risen to prominence
during the past four centuries—a minute fragment of the
world's history—should henceforth remain predominant for
ever; he seems unable even to conceive that the impartial whirligig
of time may quite easily dispense with the White man, and bring
younger, fresher races to the top. He is content to concern himself
mainly with the measures which may contribute to the maintenance of
White supremacy, if not for ever, at all events a little longer.
Since, by the prejudice of colour, we must mostly be on his side in
this matter, we may profitably meditate on the reasonable
considerations he brings forward.

There are three points in Dr. Stoddard's "irreducible minimum"
of immediate action: (1) The "wretched Versailles business" must be
thoroughly revised, before the dragon's teeth it has sown all over
Europe and Asia have had time to take root and produce a crop of
cataclysms which will assuredly seal the White man's doom; (2) an
amicable understanding must be arrived at between the White world
and renascent Asia—we abandoning our tacit assumption of
permanent domination over Asia, and the Asiatics forgoing their
dream of occupying White lands and penetrating Africa and Latin
America—for, in the absence of such agreement, the world will
drift into a gigantic race-war; (3) migrations of lower types, even
within the White world, such as those which have worked havoc in
the United States, must be rigorously curtailed.

These steps, the author believes, if taken in time, will give
our wounds a chance to heal, and permit the operation of larger
measures which must necessarily be gradual. They will allow time
for the biological revelations of modern times to penetrate the
popular consciousness and transfuse our materialism with a new
idealism. Slowly we may expect that the supreme importance of
heredity, and the immensely greater weight that belongs to quality
over quantity in the production of stock, will generate a true
race-consciousness, bridge political gulfs, remedy social abuses,
and purify the impulses of race mixture. It will also allow
time—though on this point the author is less emphatic than
his sense of the immense dangers of excessive fertility would lead
us to expect—for the extension of birth-control. The old
checks on the increase of population have largely fallen away; that
is why we see to-day the excessive fertility which threatens to
drown the whole world in blood. "The real enemy of the dove of
peace," as Dr. Stoddard puts it, "is not the eagle of pride or the
vulture of greed, but the stork." The new interest which to-day
Japan and China and India are taking in birth-control is the most
significant movement of our time. We are about to witness, not
merely in Europe, but in Asia, a fateful race between the brute
instinct of unchecked procreation and the reasoned and deliberate
impulse of birth-control, and on the issue of that race the
existence of our civilisation will depend.

Dr. Stoddard is sanguine. Yet, in spite of his enthusiasm for
the White race and his willingness to fight in the last ditch for
its defence, he admits a doubt. Everything has to be paid for, and
the White world has not been conspicuous for reasonableness, or
justice, or humanity. We have failed to adapt ourselves to the
radically new conditions which modern science has produced. The
mysteries of heredity are being revealed to us, but we are still
content to tinker at the environment; we remain simply euthenists
instead of eugenists. Our whole urban and industrial life is
avowedly dysgenic. The diminishing value of our racial stocks is
reflected in the folly of our statesmen, heedless that the crisis
we approach is of their own creation, reckless that if they make
possible another White civil war our whole civilisation will
collapse by the sheer weight of its own imbecility. We may find
such consolation as we can in the likelihood that the White world
will last our time. For, as they said of old time in a clumsy
metaphor that was yet a true intuition of the facts of heredity,
when the fathers eat sour grapes it is their children's teeth that
are set on edge.

IV. THE NOVELIST TURNED
BIOLOGIST

This review of WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY, by Morley Roberts,
appeared in the NATION of 20th November 1920.

MR. MORLEY ROBERTS has long been known as a novelist. He has
experimented in more than one field of fiction, aided therein by an
adventurous life on land and sea, at one time before the mast, in
various parts of the world. It is less well known that Mr. Morley
Roberts is also a patient and laborious student of biological and
especially pathological problems, and in no amateurish spirit, but
combining a wide vision with accurate and precise knowledge of
details. If any testimony is needed to the claim that Mr. Roberts
must be taken seriously in the field he has so daringly entered, it
is furnished in the Introduction to this book by the distinguished
Conservator of the Museum of the College of Surgeons, who, in the
course of it, mentions his surprise when he discovered that "Morley
Roberts, the erudite writer on medical and allied problems, was the
same Morley Roberts who is known in Bohemia as an artist of noted
skill with pen and brush."

In seeking to explain this remarkable phenomenon, Professor
Keith invokes the example of Pasteur who, after gaining reputation
in chemistry, turned with the scientific skill thus acquired to a
totally different science, and revolutionised our conception of
disease. But, as Professor Keith realises, the example scarcely
illustrates the case of Mr. Roberts. The "Bohemia" in which it is
claimed Mr. Roberts was trained, is not a recognised school of
scientific research. We may perhaps think, rather, of Samuel Butler
who, on the foundation of a general literary and scholarly culture,
devoted himself to difficult biological problems, with results
which, though in his own time regarded with a disdain which he
himself provoked, are now seen to be in the line of much recognised
scientific thought. In some respects also he closely resembles the
accomplished and versatile editor of the international journal,
Scientia, Eugenio Rignano, who, disclaiming competence in any
special science, has insisted, like Mr. Roberts, on the fertilising
effects of bringing the ideas gained in one field of science into
contact with another, as is set forth in his highly suggestive
Essays in Scientific Synthesis, not long since issued in an
English dress. Even within the sphere of the various medical and
allied sciences the illuminating results of what Rignano calls
"unifying vision" in bringing two or three sciences together, have
sometimes been seen, as in Sir J. Bland Sutton's attractive little
book in the Contemporary Science Series on Evolution and
Disease (to which Mr. Roberts does justice) and in Dr. Woods
Hutchinson's fascinating Studies in Comparative Pathology;
while before and beyond these we have the inspiring example of
Virchow, one of the greatest Masters of Medicine, who brought so
many fields of knowledge within the vast range of his vision.

The special formative influence on Mr. Roberts's scientific work
has doubtless been the personal experiences which have brought him
into many-sided contact with human society in various parts of the
world. His primary guiding idea, as he makes clear, is the
existence of an analogy between society and the physical organism.
We know society, Mr. Roberts argues, in some respects much better
than we know the human body, and applying by analogy what we know
of society to the body we may further scientific knowledge. The
idea is not, of course, original (it is found, for instance, in
Woods Hutchinson, whose explanation of cancer was along the same
path as Mr. Roberts's), but it is doubtless just now "in the air,"
and we may see it, for instance, in the newly published work,
Symbiosis: A Socio-Physiological Study of Evolution, by Mr.
Reinheimer, a scientific writer who resembles Mr. Roberts in
freedom from professional scientific prepossessions, although he
has behind him a medical education, but, unlike Mr. Roberts,
emphasises the complicated reciprocity of symbiosis rather than its
latent hostility. Mr.

Roberts seems still a little obsessed by the atmosphere of the
late war which, having Prussianised our military ideas, seems now
seeking to do the same for our scientific ideas. At the end of his
book he inserts an admittedly rather unrelated address which he
delivered to officers in 1915 for their instruction in the conduct
of war. Here, we may note, he begins by describing with a prophet's
inspiration, "the splendid natural activity of a military life," as
he had observed it in Essex, but then, following an opposed course
to that other prophet inspired beyond his own will, Balaam the son
of Beor, he swiftly turns round to tell these unfortunate officers
that they are just "grist for the military mill," and finally
declares that an army is nothing but "an organised crowd in
action," and that a crowd is beastly, reptilian, savage, mad,
devilish. All very true, no doubt, but scarcely helpful to Mr.
Roberts's scientific argument.

In this connection Mr. Roberts brings forward a rather
unnecessary defence of analogy. It is well recognised that analogy
is a most valuable and indeed inevitable mode of progressing in
thought. But one or two points of resemblance do not constitute a
good analogy when they are counterbalanced by strong points of
dissemblance. The analogy of society and an organism only becomes
sound when we have in view some organism very low in the scale of
life, for the higher organisms have this crucial point of
dissemblance from society The Novelist turned Biologist in that
their units have become structurally and not merely functionally
modified. It is much the same with the attempt to find biological
analogies with war (not quite happily embodied in the title of the
book), which certainly Mr. Roberts never found in the Lectures
on Pathology of Dr. H. G. Sutton—that man of little
recognised genius who first inspired Mr. Roberts to enter this
field—for the lesson which it seemed to Sutton pathology
taught is that of harmony and love, and he was indeed almost a
mystic. (A characteristic sentence may here be quoted from Button's
Lectures: "I often feel that I would like to take the
students and with them sit upon the earth naked, to know, to feel,
to get our senses into Nature's widespread operations, to enable us
to be a unity with the One.") Symbiosis—the relationship of
mutual aid between two groups of cell colonies or
organisms—may, Mr. Roberts argues, alike in society and in
the human body, become a self-protection against mutual
encroachment, an "armed neutrality," a "subdued hostility." In
generalising this idea he refers to the already recognised view
that the bones are constructed on the mechanical principles of the
thrust given and received that are employed in architecture. The
body is built after the same rules as a cathedral. Mr. Roberts
regards this as a kind of warfare, and uncritically adopts the
saying: "Gothic architecture is a fight." But the essence of war is
violence. In reality Mr. Roberts knows this quite well, and when he
proceeds to describe the beautifully adjusted balance of opposing
forces in these examples of man's and Nature's art, the exact
mutual adjustment and harmony of thrusts (for even disease, in Mr.
Roberts's view, is not destructive violence, but often a beneficial
process of repair), he is describing something that in no way
corresponds to war. It is only when this harmonious and adjusted
opposition breaks down and ends in confused violence that we have
what may be analogous to war. To describe a beautifully calculated
and harmonious balance of forces as itself a warfare is thus the
exact opposite of the truth.

To bring forward these preliminary critical considerations is
not, even in the smallest degree, to discount the value of Mr.
Roberts's work. For as soon as he comes to the details of his
inquiry he is always careful, precise, and cautious, never seeking
to state as certain what he recognises as merely a tentative
explanation. This method is admirably illustrated by the chapter in
which he seeks to explain the cause of cancer, starting from a
consideration of the skin inflammation caused by X-rays, and
seeking for light, as he puts it, "not only in the lesser
laboratory, but in the great laboratory of life all round us." The
phenomena of zoological and political symbiosis are closely alike.
We are all potental criminals at the mercy of excitation and
inhibition. "All growth may be analysed into excitation and
inhibition." "Malignancy," or invasiveness, is characteristic of
all growing tissue, and growth is ruled by the endocrine organs, so
that it is not absurd to put cancers into related sub-classes with
giantism and similar diseases connected with excess or defect of
internal secretions. When we proceed to examine the precise
mechanism of cancer, we find it consists in the mutual relations of
epithelium and connective tissue. It is in their mutual influence
and its excesses and defects, in the symbiosis between the two
tissues, that Mr. Roberts finds the real explanation of sarcoma and
epithelioma; irritation, infection, and the other alleged causes
being real factors in the matter, but merely secondary. "Anything
that throws the organism out of gear is a possible factor of
malignancy, and that is the reason why, with the increase of
wealth, a new and highly varied environment, which tends to produce
variation, makes for the increase of such disease," though, one may
comment, Mr. Roberts will find plenty of cancer among people living
the simplest lives of routine in the most peaceful rural districts,
and there is much to be said for those who lay stress in this
connection on the isolation of a physiologically decadent organ in
an organism generally robust and well nourished. Malignancy is a
failure of developmental machinery. But whether or not this is a
final explanation of cancer, and Mr. Roberts modestly disclaims
anything but a provisional result, we feel that a highly difficult
and debated question has been put on a broad and rational
foundation and illuminated from several sides. The discussion well
illustrates Mr. Roberts's argument that "the divisions between
physiology, pathology, and biology are responsible in a very large
measure for the slowness with which they all advance."

The next essay, on Repair in Evolution (followed up by a
subsequent essay, on Heredity and Environment), furnishes a
yet more wide-reaching suggestion, the more notable because of its
temerity in questioning a widely accepted belief. But, as Mr.
Roberts truly remarks: "Every Bible is first a book of revelation
and then a refuge for reaction."

Darwin held that evolution is mainly due to small fortuitous
variations which are transmitted when favourable and eliminated
when unfavourable. This doctrine Mr. Roberts here queries. What, he
asks, do we mean by "disadvantageous" or injurious? If we believe,
what has often been stated, that growth takes place in reaction to
stress, just in the same way as in engineering and architecture, we
may have to realise that "the function of disease in evolution is
of much greater importance than that of mere elimination." If we
realise the processes found in every kind of human constructive
effort, we may come to see that all great variational developments
result, not from the happy-go-lucky aggregation of small
advantageous variations, or from discontinuous variations,
Mendelian or not, but from repair in response to partial failure, a
reaction, that is to say, to some actual or threatened breakdown,
analogous to the buttress by which the architect meets the outward
thrust of his walls which might otherwise threaten to fall.
"Variation in the structure of living organisms follows exactly the
same principle." The mammal, with all its complexity, may be
regarded as the result of infinite ages of functioned failure or
disease, met by processes of reaction and repair. The variation
itself may be a failure of normal function, but if the few that
recover become a new species, a mended race, it is no longer
disease, and may even prove truly advantageous. In illustration the
example of the heart is happily invoked, "a perfect museum of
extraordinary failures and dislocations, compensated for by an
extraordinary complication of patched-up tissues, moulded and
remoulded on the general lines of mechanical construction,
breakdown, and repair." We learn to see that "by failure itself may
come eventual perfection." We cannot here invoke random spontaneous
variations. It seems obvious that there has been a series of caused
variations due to increased and varying stresses, just as happens
in an aneurism. Probably the human heart is even now being
remoulded, perhaps chiefly while still in the womb, responding with
plastic embryonic tissues to new stresses. The stomach has
developed similarly, and Mr. Roberts suggests that dilatation of
the stomach, which today is a disordered condition, may eventually
become balanced with the rest of the organism, and even prove a
permanently advantageous modification. Every variation, he feels
fortified to maintain, is definitely caused; it is not accidental
or spontaneous. Every organism is a complex of definite reactions
to definite stresses. "Life is built up by stopping leaks." This
argument obviously assumes that such reactions are hereditary, and
Mr. Roberts believes that organisms do tend to repeat themselves,
invoking as regulators in this field the action of the internal
secretions, which we know, in fact, to have so profoundly
regulative an action: "In this way a bridge may perhaps be built
between the orthodox Weismannian and the Lamarckian."

In subsequent essays, sweeping away mere verbal attempts at
explanation, and in his characteristic way enlarging the basis of
generalisation, Mr. Roberts deals with the alleged "inhibitory"
action of the vagus nerve on the heart, and with the theory of
"immunity," which he seeks to reduce to the general fact that
"living protoplasm develops machinery to deal with the assault it
undergoes." Mr. Roberts seems less happily inspired in a subsequent
excursion into the sphere of anthropology, on the place of
cannibalism in human evolution. Accepting, as is now widely done,
the validity of Remy de Gourmont's law of Intellectual Constancy
(but making no reference to that famous thinker), and proceeding to
inquire how it was that man so early acquired his high intellectual
level, he hazards the supposition that it was the pursuit by war of
his fellows for the purpose of food, and the peculiar dietetic
value of that food, producing a more rapid development of cerebral
and mental characteristics than has been possible since the
practice was discontinued. He reasserts, and with more emphasis
than ever, the old-fashioned views as to the primitive origin alike
of war and of cannibalism, without even troubling to discuss the
investigations and discussions of writers like Holsti, J. C.
Wheeler, and W. J. Perry on war, and of Westermarck on cannibalism.
It cannot even be said that he pauses to consider whether the
alleged results of cannibalistic diet are in fact seen among
peoples adopting it. The objection to the view he puts forward is
not, as Mr. Roberts seems to think, that it is shocking to some
people—for that is no matter—but that it fails to take
account of a vast number of relevant facts and considerations. The
place of the imagination in science, which Mr. Roberts invokes, is
undisputed, but even anthropology is not a completely free field
for imagination to disport in, and, if it were, others besides Mr.
Roberts would be able to dance in it, and to quite different
tunes.

Yet while these essays may differ in value—and it would
seem that it is in those of pathological subject that Mr. Roberts
has his "unifying vision" most under control—they are nearly
all well worthy the attention of thoughtful readers who will not be
repulsed by the technical terms that are sometimes inevitable.
There is, however, something more to be said about them. They will
bring to some readers a sense of fresh air, of joyous exhilaration,
such as is too rarely experienced by contact with the subjects here
discussed. The tendency of science is ever more and more towards
specialisation. The worker must shut himself in to the
contemplation of problems that every day become smaller relatively
to the whole vast field, and every day leave him with less spare
time to cast a glance over that vast field. The giants of old days
could work in large and fruitful ways, which even for them would be
impossible in our time. Leonardo da Vinci—all whose training
for science was in art, yet a supreme master of science—by
virtue of his courageous and single-eyed devotion to Nature
wherever she might lead, by virtue also of his calm and piercing
vision into the actual facts of the world, could pass from one
sphere of observation to another, laying the foundations of a dozen
sciences as he went. There will never be another Leonardo. But
still, now and again, some humble disciple appears in the school of
which he was the glorious master. When we chance to come across
one, let us be glad.

V. THE RELIGION OF
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Dr. Alphonse Maeder of Zurich published in 1918 his book on
healing and development in the psychic life: HEILUNG UND
ENTWICKLUNG. My review of it, here reprinted, appeared in the
JOURNAL OF MENTAL SCIENCE for July 1921.

DR. MAEDER is a notable representative of the Swiss school of
psycho-analysis. In these lectures, on the significance of
psychoanalysis for modern life, delivered during the war to
students at Geneva and at Lausanne, and now published in German and
in French, he brings forward an interesting exposition of the
special doctrines of that school in their wider relations. The
author regards these relations as very wide. The old world, he
feels, has been overthrown by the insanity of the warring nations.
Now, he declares, is the time for psycho-analysis to come in. It
has proved its power to heal the individual; it must now prove its
power to heal the nations, explaining to them that salvation is not
to be attained by destroying each other, but in the free
development of the individuality of each nation, in harmony with
the whole. "The idea of regeneration—self-healing in the
psychic life—governs this work." One fears, however, that
that is an idea hardly fashionable as yet among the belligerent
nations.

For Dr. Maeder the psycho-analytic movement is a reaction
against the prevailing spirit of the nineteenth century. He regards
that age as one of mere intellectualism and mechanism, an age of
materialism in science and impressionism in art, an age which found
its appropriate climax in the Great War. But already the reaction
was being prepared. William James and Bergson are here regarded as,
above all, the pioneers of the new movement. Then came Freud, the
bearer of regeneration, and now all our problems are in course of
solution. "Out of apparent chaos," to quote the concluding sentence
of the work, "a brighter and fairer vision of the cosmos will
arise; for tragic and suffering mankind there will again be an age
of faith." It may be a little disconcerting to some to be told that
in connection with psychoanalysis "mention must also be made of
Christian science, spiritism, metaphysical investigation,
theosophy, and anthroposophy."

In an interesting passage Dr. Maeder describes his own
conversion to the religious significance of psycho-analysis. It
came through the Freudian analysis of his own dreams. He found that
some dreams were attempts at the solution, in the form of imagery,
of unconscious conflicts, and he found in a succession of cases
that the actual course of events confirmed, or rather embodied, the
solutions attempted in the dreams. He came to regard dreams as
precursors of life, directing the changes of unconscious
constellations. He saw that dreams have a ideological function, and
then he realised that this function belongs to the whole
unconscious life, of which dreams are merely one manifestation.
This discovery made a profound impression upon him. His Positivism
and his mechanistic conception of life were shattered. He realised
the existence of a deeper meaning in life. He found that he had but
to look within in order to find there that living force of which
Jesus had spoken—"the Way, the Truth, and the Life." A new
strength and trust developed within him. Through psychoanalysis he
had been brought into immediate contact with what religion and
philosophy had, indeed, taught, but life not rendered
accessible.

In the first lecture a sketch is given of the development of
psycho-analysis as it appears from the standpoint of the Swiss
school. The great pioneering part played by Freud is fully
recognised, but his work is considered to be limited by the fact
that it is mainly analytic, while his recognition of
psycho-sexuality, which liberated science from ancient prejudices,
was exaggerated into pan-sexualism. Alfred Adler, an original mind,
but of different type and less breadth than Freud, provided a
valuable complement to his work. Then the Swiss school, initiated
by Professor Bleuler, came on the scene, and of this Jung soon
became the leader. The Swiss school brought experimental methods,
with the so-called association experiments, to bear on Freud's
results, and made them measurable; they turned their attention to
certain psychoses and renewed psychiatry, so that an asylum
patient, instead of being merely an object of pity and scientific
curiosity, became a human being who could be understood and
approached—no longer a chaos, but a labyrinth to which the
Ariadne clue had been found; they replaced Freud's narrow
conception of psycho-sexuality by that of affectivity, and
formulated a bio-psychological conception of libido embracing the
whole normal and pathological life, especially psychic development;
with the Swiss school psychoanalysis became also psycho-synthesis,
and Claparède extended it to education and Flournoy to the study of
religious and mystical problems. All this, Dr. Maeder declares, we
owe to the Swiss school. "Not only from our mountains and lakes,
but from the minds and hearts of our people, a stream of
regenerating force is flowing forth, of which humanity is in
greater need than ever before."

Throughout these lectures much attention is given to an
elaborate comparison between the course of psycho-analysis and
Dante's course through the Divine Comedy. That is, indeed,
their leading idea. By the process of psycho-analysis the soul is
led through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise, just as Dante was led
in his great poem. Therein we see also the great importance of
Uebertragung, of the temporary transference of the patient's
affection to the physician, which Dr. Maeder regards as essential.
The physician occupies the place of Virgil in the Divine
Comedy; he is the guide. But his part is only temporary, and in
the later stages it is taken by that divine Beatrice who has her
place in the depths of the patient's own soul.

It will be seen that this little book is not for everyone; but
for those who regard psychoanalysis as a new religion it will
almost serve as a breviary.

VI. SCIENCE AND INSPIRATION

This letter to the NATION (30th July 1921) was occasioned by
the introduction of my name in a discussion concerning the
qualities required in men of science. One disputant, "S," argued
that there is no place in science for the "amateur" that is to say,
one without the necessary discipline or the necessary knowledge to
know what he is talking about. "M2.," on the other hand,
argued that inspiration is needed in science, and was prepared to
assert that poets are the best biologists. He referred to my work
as illustrating his argument. Hence the following letter, in which
I pointed out that I could not find myself on his side more than on
his opponent's, and that if science is poetry it can only be so
provided poetry is a discipline. I might add here that even
Bergson, who is regarded as the apostle of intuition, has never
said that intuition sufficed for scientific discovery, holding that
it must be preceded by a long preparatory discipline of work.

SIR:

I HAVE no wish to intervene in the controversy between
"M2." and "S." But since my name has been introduced to
illustrate one side of the argument, I may perhaps be allowed to
say that, on referring to "S.'s" article, I do not find my place
more on that side than on the other. In the deep sense, every true
man of science is an amateur—that is to say, a lover; men of
such high scientific rank as Darwin and Galton were doubtless
amateurs even in the superficial sense. Yet they showed all the
traits on which "S." insists: accuracy, pertinency, freedom from
prejudice, a mastery of existing knowledge. If we turn to one of
the supreme types of science, Kepler was marked by a combination of
the wildest imagination with a critical accuracy never before
known; without either he could not have done his work. The first
quality, men are born with or without, and by itself it is useless;
the second may be cultivated, and will suffice for an honest
journeyman in science. On the humble level at which I am held to
witness to inspiration, I would point out that when I ventured to
attempt to bring order into a certain field of the facts of life I,
first of all, entered the conventional portal of a medical school,
and spent some twenty years of patient and plodding training, in
laboratories and hospital wards, and in acquiring the knowledge
already garnered in many languages. I have seldom thought of
science as an inspiration, though such it may be; I have often
thought of science as a discipline. Half a century ago, James
Hinton, anticipating some more distinguished men of science,
brought forward the reasons why we may conclude that "Science is
Poetry." He knew that poetry is not only an inspiration; it is also
a discipline.—Yours, &c.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

VII. THE PLACE OF REASON

This revieiv of Professor J. B. Baillie's STUDIES IN HUMAN
NATURE was published in the NATION, 12th November 1921.

REASON has in modern times fallen on evil days among the
philosophers. In classic times the supreme place of intellect was
not so much argued as assumed. It seems to have held that place
more or less securely until the seventeenth century. Then Hobbes
appeared with his keen, independent way of looking at things.
Reason, which lay, as he understood it, in the estimation of
consequences, he certainly regarded as a human trait, but
remarkably rare, right reason at all events; it mightily prevailed
in its wrong forms, so that "the privilege of Absurdity" was
exclusively human and carried to its extreme, he maintained,
precisely by the philosophers. Spinoza it was, however, who, with
greater insight and precision, dealt the first really nasty blow at
Reason by holding that it is Appetite, or impulse, and not Reason,
that is the essence of Man; Reason became for Spinoza (though what
he took with one hand he gave back with the other) the instrument
of the passions. That was not the general opinion; Spinoza was a
highly intellectual person, and such persons are apt to belittle
the intellect; that is the way in which the repressed emotional
impulses subconsciously wreak vengeance on their master. It was not
until we reach the nineteenth century that Spinoza's point of view
became common, the very century in which Hegel is by some acclaimed
as the climax of pure intel-lectualism. The reaction seems to have
started among religious thinkers revolting against the triumphant
Rationalism of the eighteenth century; Schleiermacher was here a
significant figure. But it passed over into a broader stream of
thought, and neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche was inclined to
make Reason supreme. Meanwhile, the same view was seemingly
favoured by the theory of evolution. Bergson, indeed, as we know,
even boldly took over the word "evolution" for a system which
heroically attempted to put Reason in its proper place, and a
humble place it turned out to be. Professor McDougall, in his
Social Psychology, the most influential book of its kind
published in recent years, only mentions Reason to remark that "the
intellectualist doctrine is radically false." Mr. F. H. Bradley,
who has been not less influential for a more select public, has
declared that the notion that "mere intellect is the highest side
of our nature" is only "a superstition." It would all be very
puzzling to the ancient world which had accepted as a matter of
course the statement of Menander, substantially the belief of his
great contemporary, Aristotle: "Our Mind is God."

The blind worship of Reason is itself unreasonable. There was
therefore all justification for the attempt to analyse the
reasoning impulse, and to find out its natural relation to the
other impulses. In so doing, we were not depreciating the
intellectual function, we were merely enabling it the better to do
its proper work, carrying out a process in which we might even
consider human progress largely to consist, De Emendatione
Intellectus. But it so happened that this criticism of
Intellect was pursued with a recklessness which tended rather to
overthrow than to strengthen the place of reason in life. It was
too much, for many of those who had at first most warmly welcomed
the broadening of the old arid intellectualist doctrine as full of
fertilising possibilities for thought, and they begun to protest
with the preacher: "We prayed for rain, but, O Lord! this is
ridiculous." Thus, just before the Great War, Mr. Graham Wallas, by
no means the fanatical champion of any purely intellectualist
theory, remarked, with what may now seem prophetic insight, that
the enormous disaster of an internecine war was made more possible
by representing thought as the mere servant of the lower passions;
for, he added, "if Reason has slain its thousands, instinct has
slain its tens of thousands." We may doubt, Fichte notwithstanding,
whether philosophers have much direct influence in the making of
wars. But there can be no doubt that the makers of wars are
attracted to the philosophies which put them in the right. We
cannot, therefore, be surprised that the generation which made the
Great War devotes itself zealously to the exaltation of Unreason.
Its practitioners are thus enabled to walk hand in hand with its
theoricians.

These considerations seem to be in place when one is asked to
consider the case of Mr. J. B. Baillie, Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen and Chairman of the Jute
Board. Professor Baillie produced the standard English version of
Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, and fifteen years ago he
published a book entitled The Idealistic Construction of
Experience. It is a book which, if one might venture to form an
opinion by merely looking into it, seems to belong to the old order
of thought and to be not incompatible with devotion to the arduous
task of translating and expounding Hegel, for Professor Baillie is
here shocked at those who would eliminate the term "Absolute" from
philosophy; he him-seld uses it a dozen times in a page, and he is
convinced that for those who accept "Absolute Spirit," in the sense
that he accepts it, "there can be only one philosophy." He is
assured of "the certainty of the work of Reason at every stage,"
Morality and Religion, indeed, not being "Reason as such," but
still rational "developments of Reason with characteristic
distinctions of their own," and he definitely recognises "the
common claim for Reason as the highest experience of the knowing
consciousness."

Meanwhile, the Great War has come, and, to some extent, gone,
leaving many people—including, as it now appears, Professor
Baillie himself—with the conviction that it is not so much
Reason as Unreason which possesses the "common claim" to direct
high human affairs. During the war, we learn from Who's Who,
the Professor was actively engaged in various fields from Textiles
to Aerated Waters, which all seem the unlikeliest in which to look
for a strayed moral philosopher. He came through triumphantly,
however, and even before the publication of the present important
piece of propaganda a grateful Government hastened to bestow upon
him the right (which he here refrains from availing himself of) to
place after his name the letters O.B.E.—an honour of a kind
to which not Diogenes nor even Plato had ever aspired.

Whether, and to what extent, this book was written before the
war, is not indeed clear. But we may accept the implications of its
Preface that it has mainly been written since. On emerging from
that world and returning to the sphere of calm reflection,
Professor Baillie seems to have found that he had to readjust his
idealistic construction of experience. We need not too hastily
assume that his work in the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty
had aroused a suspicion of intelligence. It may be that the
initiation into the war-world of primitive passions subconsciously
aroused a powerful answering chord of sympathy, not consciously,
for the few allusions here to the war are in the conventional tone
of deprecation. But, however it was, Professor Baillie felt called
upon to revise, if not to reverse, his whole conception of the
world, and to come forth—though he would not himself consider
this the most judicious way of putting it—to justify the ways
of Unreason to men.

There is no indication of this on the threshold. He seems to
begin in the way, according to the legend, Fray Luis de Leon began
after returning to his professorial chair at Salamanca from the
prison of the Inquisition: "As we were saying yesterday—"
But, it soon becomes clear, the things Professor Baillie has to say
are far from being the things he said "yesterday." Hegel, to whom
he had devoted so large a slice of his life, is here only
introduced to be tossed contemptuously aside. The "Absolute Spirit"
which stood colossally astride his previous book has shrunk to
microscopic dimensions, and if mentioned at all, it is with cool
disdain. "Common Sense" now takes the place of the "Absolute" and
is appealed to as the supreme tribunal, though less so as the
argument grows complicated, for perhaps, after all, Common Sense
might prove a disguise of Reason. It appears, however, to be Common
Sense which condemns the Intellect, for the Intellect, after all,
is only one function among many in man's complex individuality, and
scarcely the highest—a function, moreover, which is
influenced by all sorts of factors. That, the author declares, it
is the object of his book to show, and he sarcastically refers to
the "almost magical significance" which some ascribe to Intellect.
For as to "the certainty of Reason," we are now told that "the
Spirit of the World must have something else to do than to be
reasonable;" and perhaps (here, the author admits, he has the war
in mind, and it is the most instructive personal touch in the book)
"dramatic completeness," rather than Reason, is the chief human
quality. Reason, indeed, may have its uses, though but "little more
than the mailed champion of the passions," or, if more, merely "a
species of spiritual machinery which, if wound up, and set going
according to certain laws, will turn out a certain product," in the
sphere of Science leading us to trace goodness to "the guileful
instinct of self-preservation which equally, though with unequal
success, guides the wasp to its victim and the saint to the Holy
Grail." It would even appear that the human intellect is less
fitted for its task than almost any other function of the human
mind. The whole "intellectualistic prejudice" is, he thinks, the
fatal legacy of Greek ideals. As to the belief that "there can only
be one philosophy," he seems even to have forgotten that he ever
cherished it; casting his early dogmatism to the winds he avows
himself a philosophical sceptic, though he is careful to hedge this
avowal with the congenial explanation that scepticism can be
legitimately directed only against the Intellect. There is room for
any number of varying philosophies, nor is it necessary to have any
philosophy at all; "disagreement in fact is part of the interest of
the undertaking," for Common Sense prefers this "apparent
discordance of healthy natural sanity." Nor is the intellect, even
then, in the narrow sense here understood, allowed any credit for
philosophies; they are "the products of the artistic imagination"
and "designed to satisfy the aesthetic sense." If Nietzsche had not
already appropriated the title, Professor Baillie might have called
these "Studies in Human Nature," "Human, All-too-Human," and taken
as the motto of the whole book the Shakespearean saying he prefixes
to one chapter: "Thought's the Slave of Life." He might add, from
the same play, the dictum of that arch-anti-intellectualist,
Falstaff: "Instinct is a great matter."

It is a remarkable fact, illustrated by even greater
philosophers than Falstaff, that the disparagement of the intellect
has an exhilarating effect. Even when we have put aside early
masters of thought like Hobbes and Spinoza and Hume, still
attractive, and legitimately so, and bear in mind Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche and Bergson and James, we cannot recall any quadrille of
modern intellectualist philosophers who have made so wide and
intimate an appeal. Professor Baillie, with whatever long an
interval, is in the tradition. For one reader of his Idealistic
Construction, the Studies in Human Nature will probably have,
and certainly deserve, a hundred readers. Even those who feel least
sympathy with the author's endless "intellectual" ingenuity in
seeking out tender spots in the anatomy of Intellect and
mischievously sticking pins into them, cannot fail to enjoy that
ingenuity, as well as the versatile subtlety with which he seeks to
guard his own position, so that when, for instance, he finds it
perilously near to Pragmatism, he calmly assumes an air of strict
impartiality and makes a show of knocking over Pragmatism and
Anti-Pragmatism together. (Needless to say, they both, and
especially the first, resume the upright position directly he has
passed.) There is, however, a more solid satisfaction than this to
be found in the book. Throughout there are passages, often
admirably written, however fragmentary or perhaps inconsistent,
which will appeal as deeply true, or stimulate reflection, or
challenge fruitful contradiction. No thoughtful reader need regret
the time he has spent over the book, whether or not he responds to
the call of its anti-intellectualist leit-motiv. At the end,
indeed, Professor Baillie a little relents. Some readers may have
come unkindly to suspect that his attitude towards Reason was
largely one of personal pique; Reason had refused to be prostituted
to his ends, to prove the things he wanted proved, and in this book
he was "paying her out." But after so often asserting, and oftener
implying, that Reason is only one way of "knowing," and one of the
most unsatisfactory ways, he finally permits it a certain equality
with the other ways. We no longer seem to hear him cry on every
page: "Ecrasez l'infâme!" In an excellent chapter on "Science and
the Humanities," he justifies the ancient and sound view that
Science itself is one of the Humanities; he admits, what he had
seemed so long to forget, that "without consistent rationality,
which Science alone can claim to secure," Man may yet find himself
again "among the waste places of the world alongside the ape and
the tiger." Now at length Professor Baillie begins to realise that
"the main avenues of approach to supreme self-fulfilment and to
supreme reality"—by the intellect in the attainment of
"truth," by the life of feeling in the attainment of "beauty," by
the will in "goodness"—must be harmoniously associated; "for
unless art gives grace and refinement to the human character, it
has failed of its complete purpose: unless science makes the whole
life intelligent and tolerant, it has not succeeded in its aim:
unless the one adds sweetness and the other adds light to the
spirit of goodness, neither has fully justified its existence." One
begins to perceive that what the author had really been engaged in
doing through the greater part of this book was, as St. Paul would
have put it, crucifying the old man. It was a necessary
crucifixion, for if we cannot accept the indignities put upon
Reason in this book, still less can we accept the "Reason" itself
which had been put up for worship in the previous book.

The outcome seems to be that while it is necessary to criticise
and to amend, to enlarge and to deepen, the old conceptions of the
Intellect, there is not therein any ground for putting down Reason
from its lofty place. We may attempt to regard "intellect" as
merely one item in "mind," but when we have extracted all that
pertains to intellect there is little left that is worth calling
"mind." We may all have to go through a period of self-purgation
and cast off our youthfully crude and dogmatic attempt at the
idealistic construction of experience. Yet, after all, only by
virtue of rationality Man is not still "alongside the ape and the
tiger." It is by a sound intuition—Professor Baillie admits
the appeal of intuition—that Barbusse in his recent plea for
the Clarté group against the disorder of the world, invokes, above
all, "la Raison," and that Professor Stewart Paton, in his
presidential address to the American Eugenics Association, declares
that the supreme open question of to-day is whether Man is really
entitled to be called "Homo Sapiens," whether the events we are
witnessing "mark the end or the beginning of the period of rational
thought," the recognition that "intelligence must become a more
dominant factor in the control of human behaviour." It is certainly
true that intelligence is rooted in instinct—it is admitted
even by McDougall—and that very fact should commend it to
those who glorify the place of instinct, for it thereby partakes of
the motor power which belongs to the instinctive life—is, as
they say, "conative." But it is more than that; in Man it has
developed on to a plane above; its parity with other instincts;
reason is able, in McDougall's words, to "direct pre-existing
tendencies towards their appropriate objects." To admit that is to
admit everything. Reason becomes the chauffeur of the human car,
and we hold the chauffeur responsible for the car's "tendencies ";
we can, if need be, charge him with manslaughter or murder. Reason
is unfitted, we are told, for its task. Maybe, but there is nothing
to take its place. Moreover, with all its inefficiency, it has
carried us far, and this progressive movement of humanity, even the
existence of consciousness itself, has been (as Varendonck has of
late ingeniously argued in a special field) a continuous process of
the liberation of thought from helpless servitude to the feelings,
far from complete as that liberation remains. Our modern
psychologists often ostentatiously wash their hands of anatomy and
pathology. But if we want to understand a thing we must look at it
from all sides. Ever since Hughlings Jackson, it is agreed that the
intellectual aptitudes go first in disease—they are the
latest and highest products of evolution; the instincts which are
primitive and tougher subsist. Professor Berry has of late
luminously shown in detail why this is. The surface of the brain is
arranged in horizontal, superimposed layers; the lower, or
granular, layer, is shared by man with mammals generally, and is
well developed even in imbeciles; it was the original outer
surface. But over it, in Man, there is now an upper, or
super-granular, layer. This is the last to be evolved, the last to
begin to develop, the last to mature—and the first to go. It
is highly delicate and unstable, and it varies measurably in depth
in different individuals who, while all normal, are not all of the
same intellectual calibre. We realise how false is the notion that
intellect is merely one among several primitive instincts, placed
vertically side by side, and one of the least important because it
has not the toughness of the others to withstand ill-treatment. The
Philosophic Jester makes his ribald jokes at the expense of
Reason's instability. But Reason is unstable because it so so
delicate, so exquisite, the final divine flower of life towards
which all Nature has been moving ever since the world began. If, on
the philosophic plane, we choose to play the part of Disease, well,
we shall be in the fashion of the day. Yet perhaps, after all, the
Greeks were not entirely in the wrong, and some day—who
knows?—we may again become respectful of Reason.

VIII. THE ISLAMIC
REFORMATION

This is a review, in the NATION of 24th December 1921, of THE
NEW WORLD OF ISLAM, by Lothrop Stoddard, Ph.D.

SOME thirty-five years ago, Canon Isaac Taylor, a scholarly
ecclesiastic of unusually vigorous and independent mind, startled
and shocked not only the English Church but the public generally.
He pointed out the increasing success of Moslem missionary effort,
especially in Africa, and he stated, further, that this was not to
be regretted, since Islam appealed to peoples not amenable to the
often unsatisfactory methods of Christian missions, and were thus,
at all events, lifted out of savagery on to a higher plane of
civilisation. That controversy is forgotten to-day, but it might
have been made the text for this instructive and timely book on
The New World of Islam. Dr. Lothrop Stoddard, though he may
never have heard of him, has in effect elaborated and enlarged and
brought up to date what the militant Canon had so clearly seen and
so courageously stated in 1887. His statement of the question, far
more informed and far more thorough, will not produce the same
disturbing effect in an already disturbed world grown accustomed to
being startled and shocked. Yet there was never a time when we were
in more need of the illumination which this book holds, nor indeed
among all the subjects that concern us in the world is there any on
which our preconceived notions so greatly need correction.

Dr. Stoddard is now well known as the author of the remarkable
book on The Rising Tide of Colour, which has aroused
world-wide attention. As was here pointed out at the time, in that
book he sometimes showed a tendency to a rather sensational
over-emphasis which might discount the value of his message for
judicial readers. That tendency is completely absent from the
present work; the author evidently feels that he has the ear of the
world and that there is no need to beat the big drum. He is,
moreover, much more cautious in his conclusions; he sees that we
cannot assume that the forces moving in the world to-day will not
be modified to-morrow, and he realises the great part which
birth-control is likely to take in beneficently replacing the wars,
plagues, pestilence, and famines which from of old have held the
population of the East in check. He refers with high commendation
to the able pioneer book on The Population Problem of India,
by P. K. Wattal—a native official of the Indian Finance
Department, well known already to those interested in the latest
developments of Indian thought—as a sign that the East is
beginning to awake to a realisation of fundamental questions; and
he has himself (so it is lately reported from New York) become
associated with that young but vigorous American Birth-Control
Movement which is already extending its influence as far as Japan,
where it is needed so badly.

It would seem that Dr. Stoddard is not personally acquainted
with any part of the vast Islamic world. That is a disadvantage,
but it has its compensations. It has stimulated him to acquire a
wide knowledge of the highly various literature of the subject,
especially in its most recent aspects, and it has clearly aided him
in attaining a broad, comprehensive, and well-proportioned view of
the whole problem. At special points, indeed, some critics may
question his judgments; it is possible, for instance, that while he
fully recognises the great work of Lord Cromer in Egypt, he is less
than just to Lord Kitchener. But it is evident throughout, and
perhaps even here, that he is without prejudice. He writes as the
citizen of a country which has only the slightest direct concern
with Islam (in the Philippines) and is thus easily able to take an
impartial and not unfriendly attitude towards that great Moslem
Dominion frequently termed the British Empire. So impartial is he,
indeed, that as we read his pages we do not know whether to wonder
more at the wisdom and insight of Englishmen or the imbecility and
blindness of English governments, ostentatiously paving roads to
Hell with good resolutions, or prettily camouflaging crooked
policies with fair figures like (the later) Lord Milner, and Sir
Percy Cox, and Colonel Lawrence. Such reflections are, however,
those of the patriotic Englishman and not of Dr. Stoddard, who does
not love British Government enough to stay to chastise it by the
way.

The task that he has set himself is indeed of sufficient
magnitude, as a glance at the map appended to this volume, showing
the Islamic regions of the Old World green, is enough to indicate
to the most ignorant reader. Islam unmixed still forms a great
solid core, stretching right across the centre of the map from
Morocco to Turkestan—nearly a third part of our Old
World—while in a more mixed form it extends over more than
the half of it. It is true that Moslem dominion no longer covers
southern Europe, where it once reached towards Vienna, but on the
other hand it is ever extending southwards, covering more and more
of Africa. Moreover, in this great region are included peoples who,
at one time or another, have shown qualities of the highest
intelligence and valour in the van of civilisation. But these facts
we commonly regard as of no practical and actual importance, merely
of interest to the historian; we identify the Moslem almost
exclusively with the Turk, and we repeat over and over again that
he is effete and degenerate, a "sick man," fading away—and
the quicker the better—before our own immense superiority. It
is rather a strange view to hold, for if the Moslem is such a poor
creature one wonders what is to become of our British Empire, which
so largely consists of Moslems; but we are content to say these
things, like parrots. Perhaps, after all, they are as plausible as
the things the Moslems themselves said when they watched the decay
of Christendom and saw the exhausted Greek Empire totter to its
grave, not foreseeing that there would be a Reformation, which by
its reactions would reinvigorate the whole of Christendom.

The significant and indeed immensely pregnant fact to-day is the
Reformation of Islam. Dr. Stoddard briefly notes its likeness to
the Protestant Reformation. But there is really a resemblance even
in details, which serves to show afresh how much human nature there
is in Man, however opposed the banners he fights under and however
unlike the clothes he wears. The evolution of Christianity and that
of Islam have, indeed, at an interval of some six centuries, run a
remarkably parallel course. Islam may indeed be said to have
reached an earlier flowering-time in the Saracenic period, for the
genius of the Arabs was young and vigorous, receptive of classic
traditions, and gifted with a grace of toleration which
Christianity has only acquired, slowly and painfully, in recent
times. But even after three centuries Islam already began to lose
its pristine force, while, later on, the rise to predominance of
the Turk introduced a hard, narrow, ferocious spirit into the
centre of Islam. But the decay was long-drawn-out, with occasional
bursts of splendour, and it was, indeed, not until the early
eighteenth century that the latest of these, the Mogul Empire of
India, at length faded away. In Islam generally the Dark Ages
prevailed for at least as long a period as in Christendom, though
it would appear that the course of Islam has been somewhat more
rapid than that of Christianity, and, just as its first period
began to end earlier, so its Reformation also began to appear
earlier. As in Christendom, it took the form of small austere
sects, corresponding to Lollards and Hussites, prompted to restore
the purity of the primitive faith. Of these the Wahabis were among
the earliest and the most influential. The founder, Abd-el-Wahab,
appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century—at the
period, that is, when the Moslem world had sunk to its lowest
depths of religious indifference, ignorance, superstition, and
vice. He emerged from the old Arab centre in the desert, where
something of the ancient purity still persisted, and on a
pilgrimage to Medina his horror and indignation were aroused by the
degradation of the Turkish apostates and usurpers, as he regarded
them—just as Luther, on his pilgrimage to Rome, revolted at
the spectacle of the degeneracy of the Papal Court. Wahabism
speedily became a great force in the Islamic world. It was a
movement strictly analogous to the Puritan movement of
Protestantism, with the same devotion to the primitive faith, the
same strict morality, even the same iconoclastic attitude towards
art. Like Puritanism, also, Wahabism captured for a time a
considerable degree of temporal power. That, by an energetic
military effort, the Turks succeeded in crushing early in the
nineteenth century; but as a spiritual influence Wahabism still
lived on. It inspired the Bab movement of Persia; fairly well known
in England, it was felt in India, and it prepared the way for that
veiled but powerful Sennussi fraternity of North Africa which is
to-day the spiritual heart of Islam. The check to Wahabi temporal
power was not an unmixed evil from an Islamic point of view, for it
enabled the discovery to be made that the ancient traditions were
not so exclusively narrow and rigid as the Wahabis supposed; they
were also enlightened and liberal. And it is these better
traditions, more akin to those of the modern Western World, which,
on the whole, prevail in the Islamic Reformation, powerfully
stimulated in recent years by the war, and still more by the peace
and the Secret Treaties and the Entente squabbles which have
revealed so complete a disregard for pledged promises and Moslem
susceptibilities.

It is with the exposition of the various aspects of this great
Revival in various countries—India, Egypt, Persia, the former
Ottoman Empire—that Dr. Stoddard is mainly concerned. The
different movements involved are complex and sometimes apparently
conflicting—religious, political, national, racial,
international—some still aiming at the restoration of the
primitive faith, and others proposing to incorporate more or less
of the latest results of Occidental civilisation. This seeming
discrepancy has led some to assume that the Islamic Reformation is
too heterogeneous to prove effective. Dr. Stoddard gives good
reason for believing that this cannot be taken for granted. Indeed,
the manifold nature of the movement itself testifies to its
vitality, and Christian Protestantism likewise exhibited a similar
richness of conflicting tendency, at once religious and secular,
sometimes returning on the beliefs of primitive days and sometimes
stretching forward towards Rationalism.

It is well to indicate the points of resemblance between the
course of Islam and that of Christianity, but we must also observe
points of difference even more significant. Christianity and Islam
are to-day the only great missionary religions of the world, but
their methods are far apart. After its early triumphs on the
decaying soil of the classic world there were very few peoples left
who were naturally attracted to Christianity. The Sermon on the
Mount, which embodies the essence of Christian morals, is a little
alien to ordinary human practice, and the central doctrine of
Christian theology, the Trinity, introduced into the Creed (if
memory serves) by Gregory Thaumaturgus, is scarcely congenial to
human intelligence, so that, as a Jesuit theologian has lately
pointed out, it may be said to bear indelibly sealed on it the mark
of its supernal origin, for the Divine Mind alone could have
devised a doctrine so incomprehensively mysterious. In our own
Northern Europe, as we know, conversion, or pseudo-conversion, to
the new religion was, for the most part, effected in a scarcely
religious manner. The genuine missionaries we frequently
slaughtered. Christianity was most commended to us when it chanced
to be associated with a higher civilisation or a stronger race, and
for the rest those who were not baptized with the sword were
baptized with the sceptre. The result has been that in our own
corner of the world the real religion of Jesus has never existed.
"There has only been one Christian and he died on the Cross;" that
famous saying of Nietzsche's is perhaps extreme. We ought to be
willing to allow, hypothetically, that there may have been half a
dozen Christians—people, that is to say, who, on the one
hand, lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount and, on the
other hand, were able to comprehend the metaphysical doctrine of
the Trinity. Yet it is possible to doubt whether even a reader of
the Nation has so much as heard of one of them.

When we turn to Islam, how different the picture! However
secular may have been the early propaganda of Islam, that method
has long been unnecessary. Islam as easily dispenses with
missionary societies as it has always dispensed with regular
priests. It is a religion that is viable by its own nature, and so
is in no need of any adjuvant force. It is, certainly, a religion
that allows of the extreme of austere asceticism and the heights of
mystic exaltation; but on its ordinary levels it is a religion that
can be lived. It is not a religion that one nominally subscribes to
once or twice in a lifetime and so is done with it. That, indeed,
is why we regard the Moslem with so much contempt. We are proud to
know that we profess a religion so abstruse and so ideal that no
one could reasonably be expected to understand it or to practise
it. But the dogmas of Islam are few and simple, and its morality,
while above that of the heathen world, is not so lofty as to be
unpractical, commending itself easily to those who have not yet
reached it. Prayer, ablutions, fasting, almsgiving, and
pilgrimage—such are the religious observances; but Mohammed
emphasises the fact that knowledge is of more value than prayer,
that wisdom is better than fasting, and that all religious
observances put together are fruitless without Common Sense. Now,
the "heathen in his blindness," whom good Bishop Heber taught us to
despise, may be too blind to see the intelligibility of the Trinity
or the practicability of the Sermon on the Mount, but he is not so
blind that he cannot see the virtue of a religion of Common Sense.
That is why Islam has spread or scattered itself over nearly the
whole of Asia, whilst Christianity has remained almost unknown
there. That is why still to-day Islam is spreading, even under the
flags of Christian lands, so surely and quietly over Africa that in
the opinion of some that Continent will soon become a totally
Islamic region, save for its white fringe.

There is another significant point in which Islam differs from
the dominant faith of the White race. Christianity has rarely been
(what at the outset it promised to be) a democratic religion. In
Islam the faithful are really, as they call themselves, brethren.
That is the secret of the success of the Moslems in India, where
they are not, as in Africa, so plainly the bearers of a higher
ideal; they could scarcely have secured their seventy millions or
more of adherents there if it had not been for the anti-democratic
caste-system of the indigenous Hindu faith. Dr. Stoddard points out
that "Nationalism" for the Moslem has not the same meaning as for
us; it is of far more flexible application within the Islamic
world: a Moslem can feel himself a "national" citizen of any
Islamic country, and cherishes a fraternal feeling for all. We may
listen to a rhetorical appeal for our Christian "brothers" among
the Armenians or the Copts, but the appeal fails to stir us. The
Moslem throbs with sympathy and indignation for his brethren afar,
and his feelings lead to action. That is why General Gouraud is so
powerful a propagandist not only for Bolshevism but for Islam; that
is why the reckless insincerity of Britain's dealings in the Near
East has stirred the Moplahs of far Malabar as they have never been
stirred before.

We are still only at the threshold of Dr. Stoddard's book, which
is full of instruction specially needed by British citizens. We
have taken upon us the charge of the peoples of half the world, and
the most troublesome half. The problems thus thrown upon us are so
numerous, so difficult, and so complicated that if we all had a
fair eight-hours' working-day to devote to them exclusively, we
might still make mistakes. If we are so worried by rents, and
taxes, and high prices, and the fear of unemployment, and the
latest murder, that we cannot devote to these high matters all the
time and thought they demand, but are content to delegate them to a
Government which lives by playing the tricks long since exposed in
La Fontaine's "Fables"—a political treatise of Bolshevist
tendency which it would be in the interests of European Governments
to suppress—then it would be better to find some other
nation, with more time on its hands, to whom we might transfer this
grave charge of ordering the affairs of the peoples of the world.
It might even be better—though this may seem a far-fetched
suggestion—to allow them to have a voice in their own
affairs.

IX. THE PROBLEM OF CHILDLESS
MARRIAGE

This paper was published in the American journal, PHYSICAL
CULTURE, February 1922.

IT is well known that there is in modern times an increased
tendency to sterility in marriage. Among primitive peoples, living
a natural life, as yet unspoilt by contact with the so-called
higher races, sterility is rare. So, also, it seems to have been in
Europe until recent times. The evergrowing influence of
"civilisation" and the increase in urbanisation (for sterility is
more frequent in towns than in the country) have made the
difference. It is true that even in civilised countries—in
some of the remote "Celtic" parts of Great Britain, in Australia,
and possibly in America—it is not so rare for couples to make
sure of the absence of sterility by postponing the wedding ceremony
until pregnancy has become manifest. To those couples who attach
supreme importance to parenthood in marriage, that may possibly
seem a wise precaution; though many think that it is running
another risk to carry the "noviciate of marriage"* so far before
the partners are safely under the lock and key of legal
marriage.

[* I am referring to a chapter on "A Noviciate
for Marriage" in The New Horizon in Love and Life, by Mrs.
Havelock Ellis.]

Yet, in spite of all, sterility is growing more frequent, and
this, certainly, quite apart from the spread of birth-control, for
that does not normally mean childlessness. Except under peculiarly
bad economic conditions or on account of the defective health of
one or other of the partners, those who exercise birth-control have
not usually the slightest wish to be childless. So that the
increase of birth-control will by no means account for the increase
of sterility. That, indeed, is further indicated by the remarkable
fact that it has sometimes been found that the total number of
children produced in a series of families limited by birth-control
has been scarcely less than that produced in a series of
"unlimited" families. So that we have to recognise that the
increase of sterility is a natural accompaniment of civilisation,
compensated—indeed more than compensated—by the greater
care of life which civilisation involves. Nature thus walks along
the same lines as human birth-control, although that fact by no
means makes birth-control unnecessary, for the action of Nature is
blind and needs to be guided and corrected by the deliberate action
of Man.

We are not here concerned, however, to discuss the causes of
this increasing sterility, which indeed are many, some inborn, some
acquired by the stress of life, some due to disease. We have to
accept the fact, and to recognise that it is generally incurable.
There do not seem to be important differences in different
countries. All the authorities in various lands speak in much the
same sense. The exact proportion of sterile marriages varies indeed
widely in the estimation of different authorities. In England,
Giles, a high authority, accepts the estimate of Simpson that the
proportion of unfruitful marriages is from 10.9 per cent, in
village communities to 16.3 per cent, in families of the
aristocracy. All the authorities insist that this sterility is
often due to the husband, a few finding it more often due to the
wife; Barney of Boston finds that the responsibility is exactly
divided between husbands and wives. In the female, however,
sterility is more often due to natural causes, and in the male to
one of numerous diseased conditions.

Now when a married couple, after three or four years of wedded
life—for we must allow that interval for a possible pregnancy
to occur—find, to their grievous disappointment, that the
union is unfruitful, what is the best course for them to take?
There are, at least, four different courses open to them. But
before we consider them in turn, it may be well at the outset to
refer briefly to the moral aspect of the problem—not that
there is necessarily any infraction of even the most conventional
moral code involved in its solution, but because it is definitely a
moral question, and we ought to know on what moral ground we
stand.

We stand, I take it, in the modern world, on ground that was
largely prepared by Christianity, whatever our individual religious
opinions may happen to be, and our morality is, in its essential
principles, a continuation and expansion of that of Jesus. The
principle we are here concerned with was stated in the narrative of
a simple incident related in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, and
most clearly in Mark's, which is, no doubt, the earliest. We are
here told that as Jesus on a Sabbath was passing through a
corn-field, his disciples, who were hungry, plucked and ate the
ears of corn. Pharisees who saw them thus breaking the sanctity of
the Sabbath were horrified, and called the attention of Jesus to
what his disciples were doing. But Jesus justified his disciples,
and settled the question by a remarkable saying: "The Sabbath was
made for man and not man for the Sabbath." Therein Jesus
established our great modern principle, that social institutions,
even the most useful of them and the most sacred, must be made
flexible to the demands, not of caprice, but of real human needs.
Now, for us to-day—as perhaps James Hinton was the first to
emphasise—the social institution that most nearly corresponds
in sacredness to the Hebrew Sabbath is marriage. We are therefore,
to-day, called upon to hear the voice of Jesus saying to us:
"Marriage was made for man and not man for the marriage." There
are, we know, even today, good ecclesiastical Pharisees of many
Churches—sometimes of the Freethinking and Rationalist faith,
often as inflexible as any—who do not accept the principle
laid down by Jesus. We can afford to disregard them. We are in the
great tradition. Even six centuries before the birth of
Christianity there were wise men who knew, as Lao-Tze knew, that
living things, whether men or trees, are tender and flexible, that
dead things are hard and rigid, and knew that this was a
fundamental principle of life. There is yet another preliminary
consideration before we come to the solutions of the problem of the
childless marriage, and that is, that in a large number of cases
the problem need never have been created. It could have been
avoided by taking very simple precautions, and even without waiting
to ascertain that pregnancy has occurred before making the marriage
legal. No doubt there are couples for whom the question of children
is not one of capital importance; for these childlessness will
never constitute a "problem." But those—and they are the
majority—who consider that to have children is an essential
part of marriage, are without excuse if before they put themselves
under the binding contract of marriage, they have not taken medical
advice to ascertain whether they are capable of having children.
Such advice cannot always give complete certainty, and there are,
moreover, couples who, though infertile with each other, are each
fertile with some other partner. But it gives a reasonable
probability. A woman who, without question, marries a man who in a
previous marriage has proved childless, cannot be surprised if this
second marriage should also prove childless. The majority of
marriages in which childlessness may fairly he called a "problem"
would be eliminated if this precaution were taken. They would not
all be eliminated, and it is for those that remain that the
following solutions may be put forward.

(1) To accept the Situation.—There are many for
whom this solution is the best. Most people, certainly most women,
feel at moments, or at some period in their lives, a desire for
children. But there are many for whom this feeling never becomes a
permanent obsession. They realise that there are also other things
in life. They recognise that the world is not perishing for lack of
children, but that, on the contrary, the population is increasing
at a tremendously rapid rate. Perhaps they perceive that the work
they have chosen in life is so absorbing, or of such a nature, that
they would hardly be justified in undertaking the work of
parenthood, which is in itself, if adequately performed, almost a
profession. It may be that they have reason for thinking that they
do not possess the special gifts needed for dealing with children,
and perhaps they have grounds for thinking that their own
hereditary constitution is so unsatisfactory, that to have children
would be scarcely less than criminal. They may also be aware that,
even if they possess the instincts of parenthood, these instincts
may be in a large degree sublimated. The maternal instinct may be
directed to social ends. Instead of being the physical mother of
children who are unlikely to be of any notable benefit to the world
and may possibly be a curse, a woman may expend the energies thus
liberated in far-reaching activities which are of unquestionable
and inestimable benefit to the world.

In this connection reference may be made to the problem of
childlessness which exists for many women in Europe, owing to the
deficiency of men from the fatality of the Great War. That problem
is not, indeed, quite so extensive or so serious as some imagine.
It is merely temporary; every year the boys who were too young to
fight during the war are becoming men eligible for marriage, and it
will not be long before the proportions of the sexes are again
brought towards equality. But in so far as the problem still
exists, the solution is mainly the same as this first solution for
the problem of childless marriage. It is absurd to speak, as some
insist in doing, of unmarried women as "superfluous women." If we
come to that, one may point out (as I think it has already been
pointed out by others) that there are far more truly superfluous
women, childless or not, among the married than among the
unmarried. The production of children is not so urgent a matter
to-day as it was in those legendary days when Noah emerged from the
door of the ark on to an empty world. In fact, the urgency is now
the other way, and the next flood to overwhelm and ruin the earth
is far more likely to be of babies than of waters. The only
children the earth needs now are those who are worth something to
it, and for the production of children who are really worth while
there are wanted parents who are fitted both by their natural
hereditary qualities and their special training for the noble task
of creating the future race. But there are many other necessary and
worthy tasks in the world, and the unmarried should not be at a
loss to find them. The Great War brought to many women varied work
of kinds they had never been allowed to touch before, and they were
enabled to prove how well they could perform such work. To some
extent they have been enabled to retain the work they thus
captured. In this way they have become experienced women, with a
knowledge of the world and economic independence. Women who are
thus qualified for the duties of life, even though shut out, by
circumstances or their own desire, from motherhood, are not
necessarily deprived of intimate friends of the opposite sex. That
is a matter which they are quite able, and quite entitled, to deal
with themselves without consulting the world. It is only necessary
to add that the fact that a large number of women, as well as a
large number of men, may be excluded from marriage—more,
strictly speaking, from parenthood, but marriage and parenthood are
not yet so clearly distinguished as they ought to be—is by no
means a matter for regret from the standpoint of society and the
race. Not all men and not all women make fit partners in marriage,
still less fit parents, It is highly desirable that there should be
selection, absorbing those who are best fitted for these ends, arid
leaving others who are less fitted for these ends to pursue other
ends for which they may be better fitted.

(2) To seek Divorce.—This is a legitimate solution
of the problem for those couples who regard children as of the
first importance in their union. But, even apart from the
difficulty under most legal systems of obtaining divorce honestly
on such grounds, such a solution is not to be regarded with
enthusiasm. It is, indeed, quite possible to be in favour of the
most complete facility of divorce and yet to be strongly opposed to
the resort to that facility. That, at all events, is my own
attitude. It often happens that the second marriage which follows a
divorce proves even more unhappy than the first marriage; the man
or woman who was inapt for one marriage was really inapt for all
marriages. The law should, no doubt, make the entry to the married
state more difficult than it is at present and the exit more easy,
not seeking to join together those whom a deep inner lack of
harmony has already put asunder. But for the individual to
entertain the thought of divorce should be no such easy matter. It
is at the best an abject confession of failure in the most vital of
all personal matters, and even at the worst there must surely be
bonds of union between the partners which it is hardly possible to
treat as of no account simply because there do not happen to be
children. Married people who wish to be divorced because they have
no children, probably, if the full truth were known, wish to be
divorced because they feel that they are incompatible. So that for
them the problem of childlessness is really only a part of a larger
problem.

(3) To adopt a Child.—This is the solution of
childlessness which most readily presents itself, and with sound
judgment it works admirably. The marriage is not broken, but
perhaps even strengthened, and a real child is provided for whom
the wife can be a mother in all but the physical sense. There is
even an element of social service involved, for the reasonable
prospect of a happy future is bestowed upon a child who might
otherwise have been neglected and proved a burden to itself and to
the community. To many women, even women with a full and
intellectual life, the adopted child has proved an unspeakable
blessing and a constant source of happiness. They may even come to
speak and feel as though this child were in every sense their very
own, and while there is a certain artificiality in such a tie, the
satisfaction derived from it remains.

There are obvious precautions to be taken if child-adoption is
to prove successful. Not only must the child be taken when quite
young, but the transfer must be absolute and complete. The chief
question in adopting a child must be of heredity. No doubt there
are people who try to persuade themselves that the bringing up is
everything, and that parentage and ancestry may be disregarded.
They may learn to repent their mistake bitterly. Undoubtedly the
bringing up counts for much, as is shown by the good records of
orphanages (such as Dr. Barnardo's Homes in England) which adopt
abandoned or neglected children. But it is not everything, and
latent traits, for which not the child itself but its ancestors are
responsible, may assert themselves even in the most happily
favourable environment. A child should never be adopted until all
the ascertainable facts of its history are carefully considered
with the aid of some sagacious and experienced physician.

(4) To have a Child by a Union outside
Marriage.—This is the most difficult of all the solutions
of childless marriage, and could only be satisfactorily attempted
under exceptional circumstances. It is difficult, partly because it
requires the consent of three persons, each of whom may have to
pass through a period of mental struggle before reaching a
decision, and partly because all three persons will be acting in a
way which, they cannot fail to be aware, a large portion of the
social group they belong to would disapprove, should they ever come
to know of it. The conditions for its satisfactory achievement so
rarely come together that it is scarcely a profitable solution to
discuss. One may admire the spirit and the trust of those who thus
take the matter into their own hands, and unless we ourselves feel
that we should have the courage and the devotion to do likewise, we
are not entitled to offer anything else but our admiration. That is
to say, that we are not entitled to recommend such a course
beforehand; those who propose to themselves such a solution must
themselves measure the extent of the possible difficulties and
their own strength to meet them. No one else can presume to do this
for them.

It is true that there are two modifications of this solution,
each of which reduces the number of persons actively concerned. One
of these is for the wife to take the matter into her own hands
without the knowledge of her husband. That is a possibility
altogether to be rejected. The wife who thus proposes to leave the
husband out of an arrangement which so intimately concerns him, has
already estranged herself from him; she is, as it were, living in
adultery with her husband, and it would be better for the union to
be brought to an end. The least she can do, if it is she rather
than he who feels the need of a child, is to make him understand
the position. If he refuses this solution, he may not be a great
lover but he is within his rights; if he comes to feel as she
feels, then he will have shown a resolute spirit of trust and
devotion which should bind him for ever to a noble-hearted wife;
only a mean-spirited wife could feel that such brave trust and
devotion was that of a jelly-fish.

The other modification is that by which the wife is impregnated
without intercourse by an absent man, whether a known man or an
unknown man, medically selected. This solution has of late been
enthusiastically advocated by Mrs. Marion Pidding-ton of Sydney,
Australia. The idea seems to have been due to a suggestion of Dr.
Marie Slopes concerning "motherhood under properly protected
conditions," and was intended primarily for the women left
unmarried by the deficiency of men after the war, though Mrs.
Piddington considers her idea one of permanent eugenic benefit to
society. She would have State Institutes established where
childless women would come to be impregnated from men whom they
would not see but who would be carefully selected and registered
and guaranteed to be of sound eugenic quality. Mrs. Piddington
believes that "the child-hungry woman who insists on an enlightened
procreation will be a tower of strength in the process of
race-improvement." Whether any of these State Institutes have yet
been established I have not heard. But they can scarcely be viewed
with much enthusiasm. Apart from the fact that this kind of
impregnation is often troublesome to secure and frequently a
failure, it offers many obvious disadvantages and few attractions.
Any difficulties set up on behalf of the proposed father, indeed,
need not be taken very seriously. It costs a man so little to
become a father that his claim to the possession of the child
ensuing on his action—of whatever nature the action—is
small. But for a woman, to whom the cost is so much greater, the
matter is different. It certainly seems that a wholesomely natural
woman would prefer to be indebted for her child to direct
intercourse with a man she at least knows and esteems, and not to a
syringe.

We have thus, however briefly, surveyed the whole problem of
childless marriage. As we have seen, it is a problem which need
seldom arise, for we may reasonably expect of those who, as they
legitimately may, attach supreme importance to children as the
issue of marriage, that they should beforehand take the simple
precaution of ascertaining that there is a fair probability that
children may be expected. If they have not the knowledge, or the
sense, to settle this point beforehand, they are scarcely equipped
to enter on so risky and so serious a compact as that of matrimony,
and we may be inclined to say of them as Mrs. Carlyle said to a
girl who wrote to announce her approaching marriage, that they seem
to be "in the act of taking a flying leap into infinite space." But
for those who, whether or not by their own ignorance and
carelessness, find themselves faced by this problem, there are
definite solutions which have all been found to possess some degree
of value, and have sometimes proved completely adequate; which
solution is most likely to prove the best under the particular
circumstances, it must be left to those concerned to decide for
themselves.

X. POPULATION AND EVOLUTION

This review of Professor Carr-Saunders's important tvork, THE
POPULATION PROBLEM: A STUDY IN HUMAN EVOLUTION, appeared in the
NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 10th June 1922.

WE have long been wearied by the opposing propagandists of the
"population question:" those who denounce the awful terrors of race
suicide, and those who proclaim the saving virtues of
birth-control. The question, we know, is vitally important, and we
may be impelled to take our place on the one side or the other, yet
one may be sometimes tempted to exclaim: "A plague o' both your
houses!" One may long for the still small voice that neither
strives nor cries. This seems to have been Mr. Carr-Saunders's
experience, and as he is on the Executive Committee of the Eugenics
Education Society, and often called upon to investigate
propagandist literature, it is not surprising that on the present
occasion he has enjoyed banishing it altogether. Dr. Saleeby and
Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Theodore Roosevelt and Dr. Drysdale, with all
the rest on either side, there is no admission for them at Mr.
Carr-Saunders's door; they are not so much as permitted to enter
the back-premises where the extensive Bibliography is stabled. The
scheme of the book was elaborated during five years of active war
service, and, one divines, whenever he came upon the writings of
one of these propagandists, Mr. Carr-Saunders drew a notebook from
his pocket and entered: "N.B.—Must be careful not to mention
— in my great work." The result is refreshing.

Mr. Carr-Saunders has sought to rise above controversy to a
height at which mere propaganda is impertinent. He is concerned
with the main problems, in their large biological, anthropological
and economic aspects; the minor problems, he perceives, can only be
comprehended when seen in their evolutionary and historical
setting. He desires to view the problem as a whole.

It is refreshing, and would have been more so if Mr.
Carr-Saunders were a better writer. He writes, indeed, simply and
quietly and honestly, but sometimes rather vaguely; like a
character in one of Tchehov's plays, he has a way of ending a
sentence "and so on," and is apt to be careless; he persistently
writes the adjectival "oestrous" when he means "oestrus" and refers
to a "Neo-malthusian League" which has no existence. There is often
a feeling of limpness; the sentences are not always well-jointed;
sometimes the writer has not said what he intended to say. These
defects are correlated with admirable qualities of calmness and
sobriety: an instinctive repulsion for alarmist outbursts, a
tendency to discount the importance of sensational and spectacular
phenomena (like wars and famines) which appeal to the susceptible
crowd. But we would sometimes like to feel the splendid
presentative power of a Buckle or a Westermarck, able to propel a
great stream of fact and argument in calm yet swift and orderly
movements. The Population Problem will never become a
classic, like An Essay on Population, although it is the
most important book in this field since Malthus. Mr. Carr-Saunders
depreciates Malthus. Yet the Essay was so well and lucidly
written, the gracious and humane personality of its writer was so
well transmuted into the texture of it, that, however much the
theory may be modified, the book still lives. Those who read this
book will find their profit therein. But one fears that not many
will read who are not already interested. It will not attract as a
certain little bronze of Rodin's or many a picture by Degas
attracts, in spite of the repulsiveness or indifference of the
subject, because it is so beautiful. Yet that is what it ought to
do.

Mr. Carr-Saunders promised to lift us above the sphere of
propaganda and the name of Malthus has already slipped in. It is
because Malthus, notwithstanding the countless progeny of
propagandists he engendered, was not one himself. But in his
aversion to the noisy bands who, from the days of Godwin to the
present, have so ardently attacked or defended that famous theory,
Mr. Carr-Saunders has dealt rather too harshly with Malthus,
although he acclaims the law of diminishing returns which arose out
of the Malthusian controversy. He insists that the Malthusian
theory has collapsed and that nobody who counts now holds it. He
might have remembered that Cannan, the economist he follows, in
attacking Malthus, though showing that Malthus attempted to find
precision where no precision is, yet reached the conclusion that
the theory of population is, after all, in substance a very obvious
generalisation which scarcely admits of discussion, while the
Encyclopedia Britannica, the vade mecum for all who
desire to pursue the narrow road of orthodoxy, lays down the same
dogma in almost the same words. Even the most revolutionary among
us find ourselves counted, after a few years have passed, as
dealers in truisms, with a nimbus of respectability nailed over our
heads, whether we wanted it or not.

It is Cannan whom Mr. Carr-Saunders follows in accepting the
theory of the optimum or, as Cannan called it, "the point of
maximum return." That is to say, that there is at any one time, in
any given area, a certain density of population which will be the
most desirable from the point of view of return per head of
population. This assumes that the average income of the
population—without considering the significant point of its
distribution—is the sole test of desirability, and that an
amount of population below this point of maximum production is
undesirable. "So long as skill increases, other things being equal,
so long will the desirable density increase." He fails to point
out, as Marshall and other economists have done, that this
beautiful mechanism for the increase of wealth brings no necessary
benefit to those who have no share in that wealth. Any other view
is "pessimistic." The barbaric notion of the virtue of size still
persists; we have learnt from the Greeks to overcome it in the
sphere of art, but megalomania still rules in demography. True, Mr.
Carr-Saunders is careful to insert the conditional clause "other
things being equal," but, he well knows, other things will not be
equal; he himself insists that most diseases are comparatively
modern, associated with increased density of population, and he
recognises the importance of the law of diminishing returns. If we
grant the large assumption that other things are equal, the optimum
doctrine may furnish a convenient working hypothesis, and it is
only fair to point out that in the end, after its work is done, Mr.
Carr-Saunders is prepared to toss it aside. He suddenly turns round
to remark that, so far, increasing numbers have been taken as a
normal feature in human society, whereas, in fact, throughout
history numbers have on the whole been stationary. "It may be," he
pregnantly observes, "that we are nearing a time when numbers will
be again normally stationary, for though increase may remain
economically desirable, it may cease to be so from a wider point of
view of human welfare, when, that is to say, facts other than
income per head are taken into account."

There is, therefore, no occasion to criticise the optimum
theory. It has served Mr. Carr-Saunders as a useful clue through
his most instructive and helpful book, and that should be enough.
He is not inclined to accept the view that over-population is
per se a cause of the world's social evils. But that
disinclination accentuates his conviction that
nevertheless—in order that the optimum population, however we
judge it, may be attained or maintained—it is supremely
important to regulate numbers. After half a dozen introductory
chapters, he discusses at length this question of quantity, as it
has been dealt with in historical times by civilised and
uncivilised peoples and, finally, nine chapters are devoted to the
question of quality. In a review of The History of Human
Marriage, it was here recently pointed out that Dr. Westermarck
had strangely neglected to deal with the regulation of the family,
with eugenics and birth-control. By a remarkable coincidence that
omission has been immediately and adequately repaired by Mr.
Carr-Saunders, and we need the less regret it since he works in a
scarcely less scientific and scholarly spirit than Dr.
Westermarck.

In his laudable desire to be thorough, Mr. Carr-Saunders begins
the study of human methods of dealing with the population problem
with the beginning of Man. As we have no direct knowledge of
prehistoric times he assumes that we may regard existing hunting
and fishing races as roughly corresponding to the peoples of
Palaeolithic times, and agricultural races as corresponding to the
peoples of Neolithic times, though he would not himself
over-estimate the validity of this assimilation. He proceeds
methodically to present in detail the ascertainable facts
concerning the peoples of lower culture throughout the world. So
large and comprehensive a collection of the facts has never before
been made, and even if this book was nothing more than a treasury
of ethnographic information, it would still be extremely
useful.

The ways in which the population is regulated among uncivilised
peoples are, mainly, by pre-pubertal intercourse (this seems an
unimportant factor), postponement of marriage, abstention from
intercourse, prolonged lactation, birth-control in the modern sense
(sometimes by merely superstitious methods), abortion, infanticide,
ignorance, hardship, disease, war, famine. The size of the family
is also taken into consideration, and the common opinion confirmed
that the average number of children is smaller than in
civilisation. A distinction is made between voluntary methods of
restricting the population and those methods by which it is
involuntarily brought about (here termed primary factors and
incidental factors), but it is found that everywhere, before the
introduction of outside influences, there have been active methods
of limiting increase, the commonest being infanticide. Disease
scarcely appears to be among the chief methods of keeping down
overpopulation, for savages are proverbially healthy, until brought
in contact with the diseases and the habits of civilisation; and
since it would appear probable that a large proportion of the most
dangerous diseases arose in historic times, it may be assumed that
prehistoric man was equally healthy. It is ignorance and hardship
that more frequently destroy children. The influences of war in
keeping down primitive populations is overestimated, though it
varies in different continents. In America it is considerable, not
in Africa; Africa, indeed, seems to be, when untouched by
civilisation, the most humane of the continents, and infanticide
also is rare there. An African battle is often not more dangerous
than a game of football with us; a very slight casualty will
suffice to end it. The savage seeks to make out that he is a
terrible bloodthirsty person, but in practice he is no such thing;
it is exactly the reverse of the policy of the civilised man, who
ostentatiously proclaims that he is the meek follower of a Prince
of Peace.

Some of the evidence is here brought forward which shows how
often uncivilised peoples put life on a communistic basis; they
generally live within definitely limited areas, but the territory,
and everything upon it, belongs to the whole tribe; there must be
space for every family to settle and cultivate its own patch
according to its own needs. Every man is, in a sense, his brother's
keeper, and it is inconceivable that anyone should be allowed to
starve. It is obvious how such a system involves a constant concern
for the restriction of the population. Prolonged abstention from
intercourse, abortion, infanticide—in the absence of
knowledge of any better methods to achieve the same end—so
far from being inhuman or inhumane become the conditions under
which ta human and humane life can be lived. The exercise of these
customs may be adjusted solely by natural selection without any
conscious skill; but it is probable that a semi-conscious element
tends to come in sooner or later. In any case the method is
effective. Civilisation and Christianity arrive, with their sacred
text, "Increase and multiply and the Devil take the hindmost,"
completely opposed to the fundamental principles of savagery. There
is seldom, however, any struggle between the two conceptions. Mere
contact with civilisation, and the evils it brings, is enough to
kill off the uncivilised and so to make their restrictive methods
only an old tale of the past. The exceptions are few. The Eskimos
possess peculiarly limited means of subsistence, and some who read
in these pages how in the past the Eskimos (a specially humane
people) have had to restrict their numbers, may have read on the
same day in their Times how severely the "surplus" Eskimos
of Greenland now suffer. Few other peoples in contact with our
civilisation suffer from a "surplus." That is why the natural
conditions of life under which Man through untold ages has evolved
are so little known, left for slow unravelment by patient
ethnographers.

When we reach historical times, and the emergence of
civilisations, the matter becomes more complicated. Mr.
Carr-Saunders endeavours to carry on his analysis in the same
manner, but his course becomes zigzag, and at times, perhaps
inevitably, rather laboured and languid. But beneath the surface he
still retains firm hold of the main thread, and from time to time
points of profound interest are reached. It is made clear that
throughout the historical stages, just as much as in earlier
stages, influences holding in check Man's excessive fecundity are
always at work, though not always the same influences. In earlier
civilisations, notably that of Greece and Rome, abortion and
infanticide played a conspicuous part; later, diseases became more
effective in the same direction; migrations, to which many people
still look hopefully, have never achieved much, and the part of war
has been greatly over-estimated; it has chiefly operated through
the plagues and famines which follow in its wake; even famine
effects less than we commonly suppose, being checked by the growth
of social co-operation and skill, and it is six centuries since the
last famine in England.

It has been indicated that as Mr. Carr-Saunders approaches the
end of his task, he shows that he is well able to take a wider
outlook on human welfare than the economic. Although economic
pressure alone, with only semi-conscious efforts, may suffice to
adjust the maximum density of population desirable, it does not
follow, he sees, that it would not be better to attain a completely
conscious adjustment, and then we may have to take into
consideration some other criterion than the purely economic.

It is scarcely necessary to say that Mr. Carr-Saunders is fully
alive to the question of quality in population. Differences in
quality are a matter of germinal variation, and while recognising
the importance of such differences Mr. Carr-Saunders attaches less
importance to them than is usual among eugenists. Like many other
recent thinkers, he realises that human progress is mainly a
progress, not in germinal structure, but in tradition, but he
differs from many in realising the immense plastic force of
tradition. Modern Man was evolved in the late Palaaolithic period,
some fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, let us say; before that
time he was making tremendous strides both structurally and
intellectually; he has made scarcely any since. But he has built up
an immense body of tradition and is doing so still, with even
greater activity. As Mr. Carr-Saunders sees it, this means that
germinal changes, while not unimportant, have long been a minor
factor in human history. He attaches much more importance to the
action of the environment, stimulatory or inhibitive, upon
tradition. It is so, and not by germinal improvements or decay,
that he would chiefly explain the rise and fall of civilisations,
as of Greece and Rome. It is so, also, that he refuses to attach
much importance to "differential fertility," that is, the greater
increase to-day among the lower social classes as compared with the
upper social classes. Many eugenists have ostentatiously and
energetically cried out against "differential fertility." It is
characteristic of our author's quiet and dogged manner of procedure
that he knocks these fellow-eugenists out of the way, almost as
though he saw them not, without one word of sympathy for their
delusional activities. It is likely, he remarks, that a fall in the
birth-rate of necessity begins in "the so-called upper classes"
(the present reviewer has frequently made the same remark); where
else, indeed, could we expect it to begin? But while this matters a
little, Mr. Carr-Saunders refuses to believe that it matters much;
the germinal deficiencies of "the so-called lower classes" are far
too slight. It is the defects of daily life among the poor, the
narrowness and poverty of their environment, their inferior
traditions, which suffice to explain the main part of the
difference. Moreover, Mr. Carr-Saunders dares to question some of
the qualities which lead to rise in the social ladder. The
instincts of self-assertion, acquisition, and emulation which bring
"success" may have been desirable in the far past; we cannot assert
that they are desirable to-day; "we might view a diminution in
average strength of some of the qualities which mark the successful
at least with equanimity." There are many to-day who will cry:
"Hear! hear!"

It will be seen that Mr. Carr-Saunders has written a book
which—if disputable at points and not indeed put forward as a
final statement of questions still under investigation—is
indispensable to all who take any interest in the fundamental
problems of human welfare. We are apt to be careful and troubled
about many things in our social state to-day, and well we may be;
but behind them, and intermingled with them, there remains the one
thing centrally needful for mankind: the regulation of human life
itself. During the long past of the race this has been achieved by
automatic or at most semi-conscious methods. Such methods are no
longer tolerable; it is being brought home to us that they cost too
much. Now, for the first time in the long history of Man, it is
possible to look the problem in the face, and for the first time we
hold the possible solution in our hands; "it has now come within
the power of mankind, after a due consideration of the position,
deliberately to decide what the best solution may be."

XI. THE CONTEMPORARY PRESS

This Note appeared in the REVIEW OF REVIEWS for October 1922,
being written at the editor's request in comment on an article by
Mr. (now Sir) Norman Angell, who had argued that journalism must be
raised to become a chartered profession, and that Labour must
capture the Press, since it is useless to capture the Government,
while leaving the forces that make and unmake governments in the
hands of Capitalists.

I AM in general agreement with Mr. Norman Angell's indictment of
the Contemporary Press—it is indeed constantly present in the
minds of all independently thinking persons—though I may not
be sanguine about the remedy. The item in the treatment which I
have myself most often thought about with hope is the elevation of
journalism to the status of a highly educated and highly trained
profession, with a recognised code of honour, any fall from which
involves degradation. That seems practicable, and certainly
desirable, for journalism, when misdirected, is at least as potent
for danger to our lamentably innocent public as law or medicine. As
for the expansion of the Labour Press, one would gladly see it
brought about, though since Labour still largely, like Capitalism,
represents a class, we cannot expect that expansion to solve the
whole problem, however excellent it may be to exchange one set of
prejudices for another set of prejudices. At present, certainly,
the prospect is remote. It is the bright, attractive, illustrated
papers of the Harmsworth type that Labour mostly reads, and the
real Labour Press is still the Capitalist Press. It is the same at
the cinema; the People's Picture Palaces are all in the hands of
the Capitalist, with the usual consequences.

One feels the wisdom that guides Mr. Norman Angell's discussion.
He is wise enough to see that his sermon is more likely to satisfy
the preacher than to convert those preached at. He is well aware
that a nation which four years ago rushed to the polls in
overwhelming millions to vote for Hanging the Kaiser and Making the
German Pay (with ample leisure since to enjoy the results) probably
has the Press it deserves. It is a change of heart that is needed,
and hearts are not created anew by the million. "Wisdom," says
Rickert, "is something that cannot be learnt and cannot be
taught."

XII. KROPOTKIN

This paper was written as a contribution to a volume of
tributes to the memory of Kropotkin, entitled PETER KROPOTKIN: THE
REBEL, THINKER, AND HUMANITARIAN, compiled, edited, and privately
printed by Joseph Ishill, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, U.S.A.,
1923.

FROM time to time there appear upon the earth men who stand
aside from the streams of common tradition and, in their thought or
in their lives, or in both, refuse to recognise external authority
or external rule, believing that human life can only be
harmoniously and happily lived when its order is autonomous and
comes from within. Of such men in recent years the most conspicuous
and the most distinguished, after Tolstoy, was probably Peter
Kropotkin.

He was himself far too modest to magnify his own place in this
great succession, but he loved to recall the names of these
splendid figures in the past who had thus rejected the authority of
the herd. He went far back for the first—about as far back as
he well could go—and invoked the name of Lao-tze, the first
and greatest mystic. Then he came down to Aristippus and to the
Cynics, to Zeno and those of the Stoics who advocated a free
community and were in some respects remarkably near the libertarian
thinkers of recent days. Later are to be noted some of the Hussites
and some of the early Anabaptists. Kropotkin fails to mention
Leonardo da Vinci, who, by his complete rejection of all authority
but that of Nature and his unqualified contempt for the herd, was
on the intellectual side the supreme representative of the type.
But he could not fail to recognise Rabelais, who remains, even by
his conception of the Abbey of Thelema alone, the most brilliant
and far-reaching among early exponents of this philosophy. He
mentions—no doubt to the surprise of some—the name of
Fénelon, and he could not fail to admit the free and flaming genius
of Diderot. Then there was Godwin, who first formulated this
philosophy in a coherent modern political and economic shape, and
later the gracious and charming figure of Guyau, whom Kropotkin
always regarded as the founder of a new morality. Kropotkin himself
takes his high place in this noble band, not so much by power or
brilliance in any one direction, as by a fine combination of
qualities, for he was at once an aristocrat and a martyr, a
philosophic thinker and a revolutionist, eminent not only by his
high accomplishments in science, but by his willingness to share
the lot of the lowliest, and throughout all conspicuous by the
nobility of his personal character. Through this possession of a
beautifully many-sided nature he became not indeed one of the
greatest of the long line of such men but one of the most
typical.

The men of this type are often called Anarchists, and it was so
that Kropotkin called himself. Invented by Proudhon in 1840, and
since so often employed, it is yet not a happy name. It suggests a
disorganised rebellion against all government, and it is not
surprising that to the vulgar mind "anarchist" often means
"criminal," and still less surprising that the common criminal is
often pleased to dub himself "anarchist." But the people called
Anarchists, outside criminal circles, are not in favour of
disorganisation nor of the rejection of government. What they seek
to maintain is organisation from within rather than from without,
and self-government rather than government by others. "Do what you
will," was the inscription Rabelais set up over the Abbey of
Thelema, but he proceeded at once to point out that people who are
well born and well bred will to do that only which it is good to
do.

In the wide sense Anarchists represent a stream of opinion which
has never failed to exist. There have always been Statists, on the
one hand, Kropotkin was accustomed to assert, and Anarchists on the
other. The Statists rely on established and more or less rigid
institutions maintained by a strong minority dominating the
majority; Anarchists reject the State, together with Capitalism,
oppression, and war, to which it inevitably leads. But there are,
as we know, two groups of Anarchists, the Individualist Anarchists,
and the Communist Anarchists who believe in the concerted
organisation of society, initiated by revolution. The supreme
figures in history who are claimed as Anarchists may probably all
be said to belong to the Individualist group. Obviously, however,
along that line there is little chance of a speedy remoulding of
society, therefore sanguine and optimistic spirits tend to be drawn
towards Communist anarchism, which promises a splendid cure for the
world's ills. It was in this direction that Kropotkin was drawn. He
expected a revolution to occur about the end of the nineteenth
century, to begin in one of the great countries of Europe, and to
overspread the world. The society thus formed would, he said, be an
organised interwoven network. He overlooked the fact that that is
just what the much-denounced State is, and that after kicking the
State out of the front door he would be letting it in at the back
door. For the mob remains the mob, whether or not it labels itself
"State," and an oppressed majority has ever proved even more
dangerous than an oppressing minority. Kropotkin's psychology was a
little too simple. He asserted that some human beings are "venomous
beasts," and must be destroyed by other human beings whom he
regarded as pure-souled altruists. But he scarcely seems to have
realised that the majority of human beings are neither the one nor
the other, but have in them both a streak of the "venomous beast"
and another of the pure-souled altruist. The great revolution that
Kropotkin foresaw duly arrived, although a few years later than he
expected. It is a revolution of which the exact character and the
far-reverberating influences, which can scarcely fail to be
immense, we may not yet attempt to estimate. Kropotkin hastened to
Russia to take part in it, and there, in the heart of Russia, in
the midst of the Revolution he had spent his life in preparing, but
in which he now felt an alien and which showed itself completely
indifferent to him, he at length died.

We must not, therefore, count Kropotkin a failure. On the
contrary, he was an immense success. It is true that the
pure-hearted enthusiasts of this noble type are apt to overestimate
the power of their faith to remove mountains; they do not always
recognise, as Diderot, one of the greatest of them, had the genius
to see and to acknowledge, that their creed is "diablement
idéal." It matters little. They have let the light of their
inspiration and their courage so shine before men that it can never
be extinguished, but remains an ever-burning flame, to keep alive
in each one of us some spark of that higher life by which Mankind
alone truly lives.

XIII. PHILOSOPHERS ON SHOW

This review of DIE PHILOSOPHIE DER GEGENWART IN
SELBSTDARSTELLUNGEN, edited by Dr. Raymund Schmidt, and
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH PHILOSOPHY, edited by Professor J. A.
Muirhead, appeared in the WEEKLY WESTMINSTER for 23rd February
1924.

PHILOSOPHY may be defined as the adventure of the soul in the
universe. It thus differs from science, which is the analysis of
the material of the universe. The philosopher must not pause to put
the dust under his feet beneath the miscroscope and ascertain what
his road is made of. Some attempts are now being made to make
philosophy scientific; it thereby ceases to be philosophy. The
philosopher's eyes are fixed on a heaven ahead. Unlike Saul, the
son of Kish, who set out to seek his father's asses and found a
kingdom, he sets forth to find a kingdom. If, in the end, he finds
nothing but objects which suspiciously resemble those the son of
Kish went out to seek, that really matters little. It is the quest
that matters. In the discipline and the joy of a great adventure
the philosopher's true reward lies. What he brings home may seem to
the public in general—and his fellow-philosophers in
particular—only an empty or questionable formula.

To the philosopher himself it must always be more than that. It
is the symbols of his spiritual adventure. The aspirations, the
struggles, the failures, the sudden ecstasies at a new turn in the
road—all the things that have depressed and exalted his life
are here recalled. It need not surprise us that he should seem to
see the Son of Man Himself riding on the humble beast he has found
in the wilderness.

That is why there are two aspects in which a philosopher's
activity may be viewed. There is the final product he offers as
"truth," a constant subject of dispute because it never seems truth
to anyone else, to anyone at least who thinks for himself, and
there is the record of a great adventure. That story is rarely
told, but it is always of permanent delight and value. Rousseau has
proved the most influental philosopher, in the wide sense, of our
modern world, but he only wrote one immortal book, and that an
autobiography. Mill's Autobiography—one of the few
records of the kind in English—will be read long after his
Logic is forgotten, for its philosophic value is independent
of the value of its author's thought.

Some such considerations as these have induced Dr. Raymund
Schmidt (who has been associated in the work of one of the greatest
of living German philosophers, Hans Vaihinger), with the help of an
enthusiastic and sympathetic publisher, to secure the
autobiographical life-confessions of nearly thirty of the most
prominent German philosophers of to-day together with a few
non-Germans (notably Croce), academic and anti-academic, of various
schools of thought. Some of the narratives extend to over fifty
pages; they fill, so far, four volumes, and include admirably
produced portraits of each writer. The narratives, being personal,
differ widely, but they are all strictly biographical, setting
forth, dispassionately, the points of departure, the aims sought,
the struggles and difficulties and mistakes on the road. The
writers often reveal the embarrassment of confession, but they
realise that their task is of more than personal interest, and they
show their modesty by not proclaiming their achievements. They seem
to remember that it was a great German who said that it was not
"Truth" that matters, but the search for truth, and they remember
also, for several of them repeat it, the saying of another great
German that "the kind of philosophy a man chooses depends on the
kind of man he is." That is the spirit that moves all through these
fascinating and instructive volumes.

Professor Muirhead has lately been stirred by Dr. Schmidt's
example to attempt the same service for British philosophy. But the
reader who turns to this volume in the hope of receiving a similar
illuminating vision will be disappointed. Even the editor's Preface
he will find incoherent. Dr. Muirhead begins well, by declaring
that philosophy is the outcome of a man, but goes on lamely to say
that he will here merely present statements of philosophers'
opinions and that any biographical elements are secondary and
gratuitous. No wonder his contributors are at sea. Biographical
data are scarce or absent, usually placed apart in small type,
though there is no consistency even about that. These biographical
data are the most valuable part of the volume and would furnish
forth a twopenny pamphlet well worth the money; the rest of the
volume largely consists of what the writers have already said, as
well or better, in their own works. Portraits, precious and indeed
essential in such a scheme, there are none. Most of the writers
declare with dignified modesty that they would not dream of talking
about themselves. So they do what is less modest and less
dignified: they cry aloud the infallibility of their speculative
nostrums. Each believes he has been given a tub to mount, and he
tries to outshout his fellow tub-thumpers in the brief space
allotted to him. Indeed, the scene staged by Dr. Muirhead resembles
nothing so much as the Marble Arch on Sunday afternoon. It all
seems very discouraging.

But if the too hasty reader will consent to pick up the volume
he has flung away, he may still find something of interest. There
is one narrative, at all events, which, though written with a
failing hand, conforms to the scheme which should have been clearly
set up; it happens to be by the eldest writer, now no
more—Bernard Bosanquet. The youngest contributor, Mr. Broad,
is equally to the point for half a dozen pages, when he suddenly
snuffs himself out and turns to abstract discussion; but he knows
how to write, and we must hope he will some day more fully set
forth his spiritual adventures. Dean Inge is ever pungent or
poignant, stimulating, if not always convincing. Mr. Bertrand
Russell, though not so autobiographical as we might wish, cannot
fail to be attractively personal and undogmatic. Other contributors
to this volume might be named, if space permitted, for one reason
or another.

Yet the final impression still remains that Professor Muirhead
has not risen to the height of his great theme: the Casanovas of
the spirit, the Don Jüans of the universe, the record, as Dean Inge
prefers to phrase it, of the quest of the Holy Grail. If he wishes
to equal his skilful German rival he must realise, before he issues
his Second Series, that an editor is an autocrat, and he must hold
the reins firmly, making it very clear that what he offers is a
confession-box, not a tub, and if thereby he thins the ranks of
British philosophers that will be all to the good, for here they
are overcrowded. Meanwhile, perhaps, someone may be lappily
inspired to dump on English soil a selection of the admirable
narratives which, under Dr. Schmidt's editorship, have been made in
Germany.

XIV. A NOTE ON CONRAD

This note was my contribution to the CONTACT COLLECTION OF
CONTEMPORARY WRITERS, published in 1925. My impression of Conrad is
confirmed by a remark which Mr. Mégroz has recently reported that
Conrad once said to him: THE MIRROR OF THE SEA was the book of his
own he liked best of all, and ALMAYER'S FOLLY, the only one he
wrote "light-heartedly."

IT was, I know, the common experience of others when they met
Conrad, but one must always realise things for oneself, so that it
came to me with a shock of surprise that a man who had been for so
many years exclusively an artist had yet remained so typical a
sailor. Far more than his portraits had suggested, here was the
English sea-captain, with the open face and the genial approach and
the rolling gait—not the correct and distinguished-looking
commander of the big liner of to-day, rather the burly and jovial
sailor whom I vaguely recalled from childish days in remote parts
of the world. But over this characteristic English figure there was
a definitely foreign complexion, and—doubly incongruous in
this English sailor and this great master of English speech—a
pronounced foreign accent. The first remark he made completed at
once the surprising revelation of a personality I had somehow
conceived so differently. "I recognised you in the distance," he
said, "from the bust in Jo Davidson's studio." That the vision of a
sculptor's bust of a stranger (not the work, moreover, of an artist
who would desire to be complimented on a superficially "good
likeness "), casually seen years before, could have left so vivid a
mark on memory, seemed to me extraordinary, and seems so still.
What happened later than the first moment of this meeting with
Conrad I scarcely now recall, and it could add little to the
impression of that moment.

When one meets a man to whose spirit one has come near in his
work, either of two things may happen. There may be obscuration;
something we find unexpectedly opaque or distorting in the veil of
flesh which renders the vision of spirit less directly clear than
it was before. There may, on the other hand—and this even
with an equal degree of unexpectedness—be illumination; we
may see in the flesh, not the darkening veil but the enlightening
explanation of what we had learnt to know in the spirit. My vision
of Conrad was rather of the latter kind, not in the sense that,
even though unexpected, it was really new, but in the sense that it
confirmed my own intuition of the essential and radical qualities
of a great writer who wrote too much, and often in fields for which
his genius had not fitted him.

Whenever an artist dies who has attained, during his lifetime,
even slowly, the undiscerning praise of the crowd, his fame goes
out into the desert for many years. The artist must pay for the
applause of fools, often pay heavily. (So that there is nothing the
true artist should pray for more devoutly than to be saved from
such fame.) We may see that at the present day both in England and
France. Half a century ago Tennyson was worshipped by the crowd,
and worshipped for quite the wrong things, for what was merely
transient and feeble in his work; there was the inevitable
reaction, and still even to-day he encounters a routine of
supercilious neglect. Swinburne was more generally admired for the
right things. But he, too, must pay for the enthusiasm of the
crowd, and to a later crowd seems unreadable. In France it is just
the same. Anatole France in his lifetime received the homage of the
whole world as the supreme representative of the French spirit, and
so became nationally recognised as its almost official
representative. The result has been that a later generation is not
even sufficiently interested to discuss him. The recognition of the
rather commonplace and limited character of the substance of his
picture of the world has concealed from the immediately following
generation the high distinction which belongs to him who can stamp
"l'esprit de tout le monde" with the seal of fine art. Or, to turn
to another art, there is the example of Rodin. Before his work in
his lifetime the mob grovelled in undiscerning reverence. They
failed to see that along the road on which Rodin had set out,
sculpture could not pass, and that the "Gate of Hell" which was to
be his life-work was from the outset doomed to impossibility. So a
later generation is pleased to view Rodin slightingly, as
negligible. They, in their turn, have failed to see that here a
mighty genius was breaking up the dead and rigid conventions of the
past and feeling out for the new forms into which the living spirit
of sculpture might pass. He was rendering it possible for the men
who immediately followed, like Bourdelle and Maillol and Despiau,
to form new vital conventions, and the fact that he himself had
been pushing his art beyond its legitimate functions need not
diminish our gratitude for the great new inspirations he brought.
Similarly it has become fashionable to look back with amusement at
the Cubists, who once absorbed so much attention, and to fail to
realise that the phase they represented, however passing, was yet
the phase of a task that had become necessary to deepen a stream of
painting run too shallow.

It need not, therefore, be surprising if we seem to see the fame
of Conrad following, with his death, a similar course. He had
written a few short books at the impulse of genius, out of inner
compulsion. And then he became a professional author and his genius
degenerated into talent, a quite superior sort of talent, and he
wrote many books, long books, for the many to read, not from inner
but from outer compulsion. I am sure that he was himself vaguely,
perhaps acutely, aware of the difference. There was also, I think,
a real significance in his blind detestation of Dostoevski, not to
be accounted for by simply saying that Dostoevski was a Russian.
When Conrad abandoned his own proper field he became a Slav, and of
a sort that had to compete in art with Dostoevski; that is very
clearly seen in Under Western Eyes. But in this field it was
talent trying to compete with genius, and—whatever
differences of temperament and ideal there were—the obscure
realisation of that competition alone explained Conrad's
unreasoning hatred. He said once that if he had not written in
English he could not have written at all. By a perhaps unique twist
of Nature, genius came to him in his acquired English rather than
in his inborn Slav quality. It thus happened that I found the
vision of the man confirming and assuring the intuition born of the
spectacle of his work. The quality of English sailor, doubled by a
marvellous aptitude for experiencing and registering visual
impressions, bestowed on Conrad the power to transform into art the
life of the seaman as it has never been done before, as it can
scarcely be done again. That amply suffices to confer immortality
on his best work, whatever may happen to the rest.

XV. THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY

This review of McDougall's OUTLINE OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY
ivas contributed to the FORUM of February 1926. I am sorry to have
to add that both Professor McDjugall and Professor Freud were not
altogether pleased with the way I had discussed them, and both
wrote to me in friendly protest.

AT the present day it may fairly be said that there is no
science so fascinating, alike to the student and the man in the
street, as psychology. "A science," Professor McDougall is to-day
able to say of psychology, "which is destined to be recognised as
fundamental to all the human sciences." It has taken a long time to
reach that enviable position. Man began scientific study as far as
possible from himself. He seems to have taken himself for granted,
and he started his science, in the infancy of the world, at the
stars. It was obviously an elevating way to begin science, as well
as practically useful. Since then, during thousands of years, man
has been slowly bringing the world into the sphere of science, and
in so doing slowly drawing near to himself. But the tradition of
the early age still remained. In approaching the study of minds it
has been Man's tendency to regard them in the abstract, much as
though they were stars. Even a century ago it may be said that
psychology was almost, or quite, a metaphysical study—that is
to say, a study more remote from exact science than astronomy.

Only within the last fifty years has the advance of science, in
any genuine sense of the word, at last reached the human mind.
Anthropology, the study of external man in an exact manner, began
at the end of the eighteenth century; psychology, the study of
internal man, cannot be dated so precisely, but it was only after
the middle of the nineteenth century had been passed that its data
and its problems began to be presented in any clear and
unprejudiced fashion. Even then the man of science was sometimes
shocked at his own daring in laying cool hands on so intimate and
sacred a subject ("besides which, it is rude," the public growled),
nor can it be said that yet we have come nearer than to a
presentation of the matter. There is still room for a diversity of
conclusions, and there is no general agreement to be found even
when we turn to those students of this vast and obscure region most
qualified to conclude.

Among those students there is none to-day better qualified to
pronounce an opinion, and perhaps none whose opinions are more
influential, than Professor William McDougall, formerly of
Cambridge and Oxford Universities and now of Harvard. We are not
called upon to accept his conclusions as the final utterance of
truth in these matters, and he is careful to tell us that he does
not himself so put them forward. In the Outline of
Psychology—of which the new volume he now presents, he
remarks, should be regarded as Part II—he states that,
however dogmatically he may write, "I know that my conclusions are
only working hypotheses, which may be far more wrong than right."
That is fortunate, for even one who admires the breadth and sanity
of Dr. McDougall's outlook, and sympathises with the general drift
of his main conclusions, must be allowed to criticise the
occasional looseness of statement at some places in his copious
writings and to differ from him decisively in many points of
detail. But, however critical one is disposed to be, it is
necessary to recognise here an investigator who represents whatever
is best and most open-minded in academic psychology, and one rarely
qualified to reach a sound judgment on the problems of the mind
viewed in the widest sense. Beginning with a training in medicine,
which is really indispensable for a real grasp of the problems of
abnormal psychology, and early distinguishing himself in the field
of physiological psychology,—which is almost of equal value
in approaching other aspects,—actively exercised in the study
of the peculiar psychic phenomena presented by the mental victims
of the Great War, and throughout deliberately desiring to occupy,
above all, the standpoint of the student of human nature and to
cherish a faith in "common sense "—there could be no better
preparation. Nearly twenty years ago Dr. McDougall, in his
Introduction to Social Psychology, put forward an almost
revolutionary little book which, in its insistence on the
fundamental place of the instincts in psychology, has had a
far-reaching influence. The opinion may perhaps be hazarded that,
of all the books he has published since, none is of greater value
than the latest, Outline of Abnormal Psychology.

Its value is not, like that of the earlier book, in its
originality. Indeed, Professor McDougall here almost ostentatiously
disclaims originality. His object, he says, is to bring together in
an eclectic way what seems to him soundest in the teaching of
various schools, and especially in the teaching of Freud who, he
boldly declares, "has done more for the advancement of psychology
than any student since Aristotle." He desires, above all, to be a
mediator between Freud and a still largely hostile world.

This is an aim with which the present writer (though not
associated with academic psychology) can sympathise, because it is
an aim of his own, towards which, in a more humble fashion, he has
long been working. Indeed, I might perhaps say that it is an aim
which has been mine ever since the publication of Freud's first
book with Breuer, ten years before Professor McDougall began to
interest himself in psycho-analysis; and the summary of the
conclusions of that first book in the second volume of my
Studies in the Psychology of Sex may possibly have been the
first sympathetic account of Freud's doctrines—then far from
their later development—which appeared in English.

It led to a friendly relationship with Freud by letter, which
has continued ever since. He has never regarded me as a disciple,
and I have always exercised towards him a critical discrimination
which would be out of place in the adherents of a sect. For it has
been the unfortunate fact that at an early period Freud became the
head of a sect, on the model of those religious sects to which the
Jewish mind has a ready tendency to lend itself, as the whole
Christian world exists to bear evidence. It is, doubtless, a noble
and precious aptitude which we are not called upon to question. But
it fails to lend itself to scientific ends. The results in the
Freudian school were painful to all concerned and unedifying to the
world. An intimate narrative of some of the associated episodes has
lately been written by Dr. Stekel, with all his profuse and
complacent candour, and it is a distressing narrative. Almost from
the first all those adherents of Freud who, following the example
of the master, displayed original vigour and personal initiative in
development were, one by one, compelled to leave the sect, when
they were not actually kicked out. Those that to-day in Austria and
Germany remain faithful and humble followers of Freud are likely to
continue so, for—since the lamented death of Karl Abraham,
whose rare abilities marked him clearly out as the personal
successor to Freud in the leadership of a school—they will
never be pioneers; the chief of them, indeed, have not even had a
medical training, and would be unfitted to strike out any paths for
themselves; they are just admirable and enthusiastic workers, who
may be trusted to follow strictly Freudian lines, and sometimes
perhaps reduce them to absurdity. For no man has ever had more
reason than Freud to pray to be delivered from his friends. No man
was ever less fitted to be the head of a sect. He is far too
genuine a man of science, far too much an artist—like all the
greatest men of science—to be pegged down in a chapel and
tied to a creed. He is in perpetual vital movement. His standpoint
to-day is not where it was yesterday, and to-morrow it will not be
where it is to-day. He has always been rather indifferent to what
previous workers have found, and thereby perhaps an undue degree of
originality has sometimes been attached to his discoveries; but he
might well say, with Hobbes: "If I had read as much as other people
I should know as little as other people." It is by his freedom from
tradition, and his indifference to it—however, in some
aspects, that may be a disadvantage—that he has acquired his
pioneering freshness of vision, that childlike quality by which
alone the Kingdom of Science, like the Kingdom of Heaven, may be
entered. It is by that freedom that he is perpetually enabled to
move on from point to point, without ever lingering on the lower
height once it is conquered. The Freudians, we may be sure, will
soon pass away. But Freud will not pass away. Like the hero of
Ibsen's Enemy of the People, he testifies to the great truth
that the strong man is the man who stands alone. And when Dr.
McDougall declares that the figure of Freud joins hands across the
ages with Aristotle, that is not altogether to be dismissed as a
rhetorical gesture. One who has studied Freud's work, in an often
critical spirit, during thirty years, may be allowed to agree that
it is not easy to overrate the importance of Freud. And that
importance will remain even if all the doctrines specially
associated with Freud's name should pass away or become—as
indeed they constantly are becoming even in his own
hands—transformed into other shapes.

The value and significance of this very substantial
Outline (there are nearly 600 pages of it) is that a
distinguished and influential professor of psychology (although he
disclaims any merely academic attitude) here makes the most
imposing effort which has yet been made to do what others of us
have been seeking to do on a smaller scale: to introduce the work
of Freud, in shapes that may be acceptable, into the current of the
world's psychological thought. Even the most devoted Freudian, in
his most ecstatic moments, can scarcely have supposed that the
world's psychology could ever be accommodated in the Freudian
chapel. The movement must be in the opposite direction. It is the
world's psychology which must take in Freud. Here we see the most
vigorous and hopeful effort yet made to introduce the conceptions
of Freud into the vital movement of the world's thought.

As he himself seems to recognise, Dr. McDougall is helped to
perform the important function he here undertakes, not only by his
training but by certain coincidences of attitude and disposition.
He shares Freud's view of the fundamental dynamic function of the
instincts, and, like Freud, one may add, his natural tendency is to
disregard what other workers have done. We see that, indeed, in the
delay which took place in his recognition of Freud's existence, and
even yet, notwithstanding the attention he claims to have given to
psychoanalytic literature, one notes certain extraordinary
omissions, so that there is, for instance, only one passing
reference to the castration-complex which Freudians rate so highly.
And we see it again in his meek acceptance of the assumption that
before 1900 dreaming was regarded as merely "a chaotic rumbling of
the brain-cells, of no interest to science." A ludicrous notion,
when we recall all the attempts to study dreaming, both from the
point of view of science and of psychological medicine, before that
time! That Freud has put them into the shade we may all admit. But
on one point Dr. McDougall owns to a disqualification to which he
perhaps attaches undue importance. He regrets that (except as
regard his dreams) he has never been psycho-analysed. But Freud
himself is in the like case. The objection, therefore, can hardly
be fatal. It may also be remarked that the instructive results of
analysis are usually but small for persons of a critical and
introspective temperament—as we may assume psychologists to
be—and such persons are apt to prove rebellious to
analysis.

It must not be supposed that this book of Dr. McDougall's is all
concerned with Freud and the Freudians. It discusses the attitude
of other psycho-analysts—especially and sympathetically
Jung—and it extends still further to all the great divisions
of abnormal psychology, to the questions of psychological types, to
the chief forms of insanity, to double personality, thereby
bringing in Dr. Morton Prince, Dr. Healy, and other eminent
psychological analysts. But it is Freud who chiefly dominates the
book, and it is clear that Dr. McDougall intends that it should be
so.

To go over the whole field here presented to us, whether with a
view to exposition or to criticism, would be out of place, even if
space permitted. It must suffice to say that every reader who is at
all interested in the fascinating problems involved will find it an
absorbing task to follow this discussion, whether or not he always
agrees with Dr. McDougall's conclusions. The present writer, I may
add, is much more often than not disposed to agree.

To certain tendencies of Dr. McDougall's mind it is, indeed,
possible to be rebellious. He still seems to have a prejudice
against the intellect. But the intellect is merely the elaborate
manifestation of the instinct to reason, which in its simple forms
is one of the most fundamental of the instincts, and one of the
most important, for the time has surely now gone by when prejudiced
observation refused to see reason in the actions of
animals—an elementary reason, it may be, yet how elementary
the action of reason often is even in human beings! And he still
has a little phobia with regard to the use of the word "mechanism";
he prefers "process." But, as the dictionary shows, "mechanism"
merely means "an arrangement to apply power to a useful purpose,"
and process "a series of motions." Both words are harmless. Freud,
whose standpoint as regards impulses Dr. McDougall tells us is his
own, often talks of the mental apparatus; in speaking, for
instance, of such a process as sublimation, the mechanical analogy
can hardly be avoided, for it lies in the word itself; and provided
we remember—as we can scarcely fail to when we are concerned
with the psychic organism—that we are using an "as if," this
verbal phobia seems useless.

But there is no need to dwell on small points for possible
criticism. It is enough here to welcome the courage and skill which
Professor McDougall has displayed in this notable book. He has
opened the doors of academic psychology just wide enough to admit
some of the most fruitful conceptions of our time.

XVI. ROMAIN ROLLAND

The late Léon Bazalgette brought together in L'EUROPE, the
magazine he was then editing, a number of international tributes to
Romain Rolland, and invited me to take part as a representative of
England. Hence this note in L'EUROPE for 15th February 1926.

"WHAT are you fighting for?" someone asked a Parisian workman at
the barri-cades in 1848. "Pour la solidarité humaine, monsieur!" It
is the glory of France that she has always been able to produce men
who were able to fight, and even to die, for "la solidarité
humaine." That is the France that is a radiant figure among the
nations, the France which the English poet acclaimed as "this poet
among the nations."

There is another France. France is not only the land to which we
owe the conception of the League of Nations and the Federation of
Europe. Every country has a double aspect, and represents the
union—often the conflict—of opposites. France is, for
the rest of the world, not only the representative of human
solidarity, but also of devastating militarism. It is true that
there are always those to be found who are prepared with infinite
ingenuity to explain away French militarism, and would have the
world believe that the wolf's skin covers a lamb. There are,
however, Frenchmen themselves who proclaim, even to-day, their own
narrow nationalism, their religious fanaticism, their intolerant
inability to comprehend the temperament of other nations or even of
their own fellow-countrymen. It may seem at times that France is
dominated by this element in her temperament. When we approach
Germany it is Goethe, with his truly international outlook, whom we
see before Bismarck, and even in England Shakespeare is more than
the rival of Nelson, but in France there is none to rank with
Napoleon. If that is so, we owe all the greater honour to those
Frenchmen who dare to champion, beyond nationalism, the greater
claims of human solidarity. Romain Rolland has in recent years
stood before the world as such a champion, and the representative
of the most glorious aspect of France. This fragile and sensitive
figure, with a strength greater than that of steel, has upheld the
cause of human solidarity amid the spiteful calumnies of his own
people and often the indifference of the world, which had formerly
recognised with enthusiasm his delicate and sympathetic qualities
as an artist. It is as the champion of human solidarity that we
honour him. It is admirable to be a good Frenchman, and it is
admirable to be a good German, but France and Germany are so held
together by the everlasting bonds of proximity, and even of blood,
that the very name of France is German, and he who is only a good
Frenchman or a good German remains incomplete. It is only by being
a good European that either Frenchman or German can attain to
complete human development. It is towards that aim that Romain
Rolland's action has ever been directed.

XVII. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH
ROMANCES

This review of the first five volumes of the series of
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ROMANCES, in English translation, edited
by Mr. Vyvyan Holland, appeared in the BIBLIOPHILE'S ALMANACK for
1927.

THE coming of the twentieth century was marked by a revived
interest in the eighteenth, and that interest has been heightened
and generalised by the influences springing from the Great War. To
some of us of an older generation, who had already learnt in the
nineteenth century to appreciate the qualities of the eighteenth,
this awakening of the younger generation cannot fail to be welcome.
It is to-day pleasant to find that even the publishing world is
recognising the new orientation of taste.

Among the signs of such recognition the series of
Eighteenth-Century French Romances, as it is called by
Messrs. Chapman & Hall who publish it, edited by Mr. Vyvyan
Holland, and printed at the Curwen Press, occupies, as we should
expect from the names of its producers, a notable and attractive
place. Certainly we may be allowed to feel surprise at the choice
of a title for the Series.

Romances! If there is any statement we may make about the
eighteenth century without fear of serious contradiction, it is
that that century usually restrained the common human impulse to
romance, and if there is any fact about it that is fairly clear, it
is that it is anti-romantic. No doubt in so exuberantly rich a
century there were exceptions, and splendid exceptions; it is
enough to remember that Rousseau produced the supreme romance which
was to dominate and guide the romantic literature of the generation
that followed. In general, even the fantastic fiction of the
eighteenth century was not romantic but of the Eastern magical type
which its own pioneering activity, through Galland, discovered and
often blended with the fairy-tale form which France had introduced
through Perrault in the previous century, but both used not for
romantic ends but as a deliberately transparent veil for realism.
The typical fiction of the century was realistic, whether robust
and virile in England as it culminated in Fielding, or delicate and
in the finest sense feminine in France as it was initiated by
Marivaux, to reach its climax with increased vitality at the end in
Laclos and in Stendhal, the last belated representative of the
eighteenth century, neglected by Hugolatrous France, though from
the first appreciated in some at least of his aspects by more
conservative England. All the books of this series are in the true
spirit of the eighteenth century, but scarcely one of them can
properly be called a romance, while the name is obviously and
flagrantly unfitted for Le Neveu de Rameau, the brilliant
fantasia of a many-sided philosopher.

When we have overcome the shock of the general title and proceed
to examine the shape in which the volumes themselves are produced,
there seems little occasion for anything but satisfaction. The
series is addressed to the lover of books rather than to the
general reader, but by their form and light weight the volumes are
fitted for the reader as well as the collector of books. Type and
paper and binding alike witness to the good taste by which the
producers have been guided, and special note should be made of the
harmony which has been achieved between the French
eighteenth-century contents of the volumes and the shape in which
they are put forth. This congruence of form and substance is far
too rarely achieved in book production, if ever attempted. One
notes numerous typographical defects in the first volume of the
series, but not in those that follow.

When we turn to the substance of these volumes, we find them
fully worthy of the form they assume. The selection, so far, shows
a fine judgment on the editor's part, and he has been fortunate in
securing such translators. Where all are admirable it is unfair to
signalise any, but two of the volumes offered special difficulties,
and one may be forgiven for noting the skill with which Mr. Eric
Sutton has caught the tone of Crébillon and the high spirit with
which Mrs. Jackson has happily faced the (at all events for an
English translator) embarrassing Diderot, though she must sometimes
have felt as the Empress Catherine felt after an interview with
that wonderful man. It was a happy thought to open the series with
a delightful story, so typical and so little known, as La
Poupee; and all the others, each in its own way, are well
deserving of their place. Perhaps Angola, in spite of its
long-maintained reputation, is to-day the least interesting,
because it is the least attractively personal in style and the most
conventional, but it is so representative of its age that its
selection cannot well be criticised. The editor has been as
fortunate in the distinguished list of introducers as in his
translators. But it is always difficult for an editor to tell how
an introducer, eminent as he may be, will acquit himself in the
special post to which he has been assigned. There is considerable
variation to be noted here. Mr. Shane Leslie, perhaps because he
had no guiding example to follow, has not been felicitous; he
spends much of his space in a summary of the story—quite
unnecessary, as the reader already has the story before
him—and he says not one word about the author and the
circumstances of the authorship, though that is what the reader
chiefly needs to know. The failure to tell Bibiena's tragic story
is no doubt what every foreigner expects from "British hypocrisy,"
but it is unpardonable; and, moreover, Bibiena's fate has a
psychological bearing on his novel. Incidentally, Mr. Leslie makes
statements that are either incorrect or questionable, though it is
a redeeming point that he recalls Beardsley's Under the
Hill, probably the most exquisite English story in the
eighteenth-century manner, a story that would perhaps be still more
in that manner if we possessed it as it was written. Mr. Compton
Mackenzie writes with swift, easy vivacity, but if we were to
follow him with a deliberation he scarcely invites, we might find
much to question in his treatment both of the great figure of
Diderot and the very various eighteenth century. Mr. Hugh Walpole
shows hearty and deserved appreciation of Boufflers, and says all
that is necessary of that excellent story-teller. Mr. Augustus
John, working in an unfamiliar medium, is competent, through he is
content to be slight. By far the most masterly essay in these
volumes is Mr. Aldous Huxley's. Crébillon has been so persistently
and so ignorantly dismissed—like a still greater writer of
his century, Laclos—as "licentious" or "frivolous," that it
is an immense satisfaction to find him at last recognised as
artist, psychologist, and moralist, the first in his own difficult
field. Mr. Huxley's essay is a fine piece of criticism, and does
adequately what one, at least, of his readers has often dreamed of
attempting to do.

If the remaining volumes of the series—of which twelve are
planned—reach the same level, this will be a memorable
collection with a place by itself. One may hope that the editor
will see fit to introduce more of Crébillon—not indeed Le
Sopha, with which his name is too often associated, for it is
far from being among his best achievements, but at all events Le
Hasard au coin du Feu, and possibly, if not too long, the
Lettres de la Marquise de M—— as an example of
the amorous stories by correspondence of that age. There is more
also of Diderot to set beside, or but little below, Le Neveu de
Rameau (even when we have put aside the doubtless too alarming
Bijoux Indiscrets), such as Rêve de D'Alembert and
the episode of Mme de la Pommeraye.

XVIII. MORAL CRITICISM

This review of the translation by Mr. Montgomery Belgian of
Ramon Fernandez's MESSAGES appeared in the New York NATION for 8th
June 1927.

THE criticism of critics is to-day an occupation actively
pursued. The reason is that there are now so many critics. And
there are so many critics because criticism has become the business
not only of the few who regard it as a lifelong vocation, but of
the many who find it the best preparation for their life's
vocation, all the ardent young spirits who, in order to find their
own place in the world, feel the need to scrutinise searchingly the
significant figures imposed on them as leaders.

The volume of Etudes, in which Jacques Rivière appeared
before the world at the age of twenty-six, is a typical example of
this sort. Rivière was not primarily interested in literature; he
had set himself to explore the world in general and his own soul in
particular (his lately published intimate correspondence with
Alain-Fournier, to whom he dedicated the Etudes, reveals his
aims), but he realised at the outset that to situate himself in the
world he must grapple with those figures of his time in literature
and painting and music which he instinctively felt to be
significant; and his instinct proved right, for all now recognise
that significance, even though Rivière himself, when twelve years
later—shortly before his early death two years ago—he
republished the book, was keenly conscious of its critical
inadequacy.

I mention Rivière, because it is from him that M. Fernandez
claims to proceed. This does not mean that in any narrow sense he
is a disciple. In an introductory "In Memoriam" of Rivière (omitted
in the translation and rightly, for it comes in rather awkwardly),
the author of Messages makes clear that the special value of
Rivière for those who knew him was as a medium in which each could
freely develop his own personality. It would, therefore, be idle to
discuss the relation to Rivière of M. Fernandez. He has his own
strongly marked personality.

It may not be unreasonable to find, to some extent, the clue to
that personality in heredity and upbringing. M. Fernandez was born
in Mexico and belongs to a distinguished family, his father at one
time Mexican Minister to France; his mother is Southern French, and
he was himself taken as a child to France, where he has ever since
chiefly lived. We may thus understand his large international
outlook, and in part—not entirely, for it is mainly
temperamental—the influence exerted on him by writers of
English origin. Of the ten figures dealt with in this volume, five
have written in English (Meredith, Newman, Pater, Conrad, and T. S.
Eliot); of the others, one is German (Freud) and another (Maritain)
possesses, as probably M. Fernandez would admit, little
significance outside France. There remain Stendhal, Balzac, and
Proust.

As Etudes was Riviere's first book, so Messages is
the first book of M. Fernandez, produced at a less youthful age,
and the work of a more mature thinker, indeed one who, from the
outset, we may be sure, bore the impress of more decisive
individuality than the supple and sensitive Rivière, wave-like and
diverse; we should expect to find in the man of Spanish race a
"convinced individualist," as M. Fernandez describes himself, while
the Spanish flavour we detect in Riviere's native Gascony is but a
faint infusion. The title of this book must be read in the
favourite English sense; the men here discussed have come to the
author with a "message."

That may suggest, and I think rightly, that M. Fernandez is
fundamentally a moralist, a moralist who appears before us wearing
the mask—certainly an excellent mask—of the critic.
Naturally, that is not the way he would himself put it. In the
admirable introductory essay of the volume, no doubt the most
recently written as well as the most notable, M. Fernandez sets
forth his own conception of his task as being that of a philosophic
critic, that is, as he understands it, a critic who is not content
to discuss a work of art for its own sake, technical or historical,
but to seek out its "spiritual dynamism," and to ascertain what
place it is entitled to occupy in the human universe. There is much
of subtle and suggestive value, throughout the volume, of a
"philosophic" or, one might say, philosophically psychological
character, especially concerning the relation of an author's work
to his "personality," which it is not possible to deal with in a
summary review. But the author's ultimate interests are always less
with thought than with activity in the world, and the "spiritual
dynamist" is what in common English we call a "moralist." He
frequently, we note, uses the word "spiritual "—a word which
some English critics consider meaningless—but he is careful
to explain that he means by it "the internal unification of
concrete experience." We may compare M. Fernandez with the great
English critic of the Victorian Age of fifty years ago, with
Matthew Arnold and his Essays in Criticism. There was a
vital difference, for Arnold was a master of prose, which M.
Fernandez at present can scarcely claim to be; but Arnold also set
forth "messages," which to him came chiefly from France, as those
of M. Fernandez chiefly from England; and equally with the
Frenchman, Arnold would have repelled the idea of being a moralist,
though that "joyful sense of creative activity" which for him was
the essence of criticism is not far from the "spiritual dynamism"
of M. Fernandez. A radical impulse to seek out the motive forces of
living is apt to make a searching and ruthless critic, and such M.
Fernandez often proves himself to be. His essay on the method of
Balzac is in this respect characteristic, though it is not of his
best. It is partly based on the youthful aprioristic method of
starting with arbitrary definitions and classifying in accordance
with those definitions. Here there is much fine-spun distinction
between the "novel" and the "narrative." It is a method of
criticism I can sympathise with, for I recall how in youth I used
to maintain precisely the same thesis and even to cite the same
work, Madame Bovary, as the type of the novel. Such academic
exercise is good in youth, but now seems to me supremely
indifferent. As one grows older one realises that to appreciate a
work of art the critic must put himself in the situation out of
which that work sprang, reproducing to himself the artist's vision
of it (that is what the academic critic shrinks from, to fall back
into mechanical classification), so that when we have grasped the
world the artist has created we may judge how far he has succeeded
and how far his success has for ourselves any human value. We cast
aside rigid artificial categories, which is why, as Croce has truly
observed, criticism is so much more difficult than is commonly
supposed. Here M. Fernandez so cruelly analyses the method of
Balzac that we begin to ask ourselves how he accounts to himself
for Balzac's fame in the world, until at the last moment he reveals
the fine critic he is and concisely sums up what remains
significant in the genius of Balzac.

Even more characteristic, and not less searching, is the
attitude of M. Fernandez towards Proust. There is on the surface an
apparent contradiction in his feelings about Proust: on the one
hand an immense admiration; on the other, a severe critic, eager to
deny that he is a "Proustian." But the ambiguity scarcely exists
for anyone who has entered into the spirit of M. Fernandez. We are
here brought to the core of his problem, the problem, as he himself
expresses it, of "the spiritual experience of the nineteenth
century" and the question of what it furnishes "to assure to human
life a better return." The human organism has, even anatomically, a
sensory aspect and a motor aspect. On the sensory it reflects the
images of the external world, and Proust (I am not here following
M. Fernandez) stands out as the revealer, in an exquisite degree
never before attained, of such sensory images. So keen an
attentiveness, so absolute a passivity, could not exist without
compensatory defect on the motor side; that is the price to be
paid. We do not need to read about Proust's life, or to listen to
what Parisian literary scandal (truthfully or not) adds, to accept
the necessity of that price. M. Fernandez, too, accepts it; but he
accepts it with a struggle. His own tendency is so emphatically to
the motor side, he is so instinctively a champion of "spiritual
dynamism," that Proust at the same moment casts on him a
fascinating spell and arouses a fierce revolt. The whole of his
essay on Proust is the criticism, acute and just, of Proust's
"insufficiency," but we would like to see it more clearly
emphasised that that defect was the foundation of Proust's fine
quality. M. Fernandez relegates to a footnote the suggestion that
there was in Proust "a premature fixation of sensibility, an arrest
of development." There he is on the right track, and he might more
precisely have implicated the invasion of that nervous affliction
of asthma at the age of nine which hampered Proust's normal
development and furnished the stimulus to his superb abnormal
development. But this essay, significant as it is, must not be
taken as our author's last word on Proust. In the introduction,
"Proust's title of glory" is fully recognised, and since the
present volume was published M. Fernandez has become editor of the
Cahiers Marcel Proust which are to bring together with
reverent care even the most minute Proustiana.

But we may best understand M. Fernandez's attitude to Proust
when we turn to the essay he entitles "The Message of Meredith,"
whom he reasonably regards as the exact opposite of Proust. It was,
I believe, his first published essay, and it lays bare his
essential sympathy with those who express the motor side of life
and its "spiritual dynamism." Among English readers just at present
Meredith is scarcely a prophet; either he is too far or too near,
and so proves irritating, while a tendency to romantic rodomontade
(I speak for myself and the memory of an attempt made, at the
suggestion of a fine critic, to read Harry Richmond some
thirty years ago) is apt to alienate; for if it is true, as M.
Fernandez asserts, that "Meredith decapitated romanticism," he left
to it a considerable body. Still, it is good for the English reader
to have Meredith so clearly and freshly set forth, even with an
excess of enthusiasm, and to realise that in his constant endeavour
to harmonise living activity with intellectual activity, to
establish the creative interaction of life and thought, he still
has a "message" for the world.

It may seem piquant to the English reader to find Newman placed
side by side with Meredith. Whether Meredith would have been amused
or indignant at the juxtaposition is uncertain; Newman would
doubtless have been painfully hurt. But M. Fernandez gives good
grounds for his faith. His admiration is here clearly limited; he
does not share the beliefs of "this almost mediaeval priest," but
he finds in him something "even uniquely modern." Here are more
subtle points to bring out than when Meredith was discussed, but
equally germane to the author's conception. Newman appears as an
individualist, opposing a narrow and myopic rationalism by a deeper
conception of complex elements of personality demanding harmonious
persuasion; here is invoked that "Illative Sense" which Newman set
forth in the Grammar of Assent and regarded as something
corresponding to taste in the fine arts, "a personal gift or
acquisition" rather than a logical process, a sense which to follow
is, as M. Fernandez admits, "a perilous path," but all that he has
to say about it remains suggestive.

Regarded as a book, Messages seems to have been put
together by simply collecting the author's literary essays, long
and short, which thus often remain out of proportion alike in
length and substance. The short essays come at the end, and the
last is devoted to Mr. T. S. Eliot, whom, it is pleasant to note,
M, Fernandez recognises as "one of the most profound of
contemporary critics." He neglects to add that Mr. Eliot is a
critic who knows how to write; clear expression means clear
thought, though not necessarily deep thought, and there are moments
when M. Fernandez may possibly be deep but is certainly not clear.
But at least he is always vigorous and sincere, a subtle thinker,
and robust, if not always delicate, in esthetic appreciation. Among
the literary movements of to-day he is well fitted to be a leader
and guide.

He has found an admirable translator in Mr. Belgion, to whose
insight and prompt action we owe the English version so soon after
the publication last year of the original. The translation
scrupulously follows the original, save where it rather betters it,
silently amending slight oversights. Useful footnotes have also
been added to explain references that English readers might find
obscure. I would myself demur to a few small statements in these
notes: Thibaudet is possibly the best of French academic critics,
but would be flattered to hear that he is "an essayist in the
manner of Montaigne "; the paradoxical Maurras is not adequately
described as "an avowed atheist" if it is not added that he is also
a champion of the Catholic Church; Brémond's name is connected with
a futile discussion of "pure poetry," but nothing said of his main
life-work, the History of the Religious Sentiment in France.
These are trifles. The main point is that we here see adequately
presented to the English reader a book which concerns all those who
experience the impulse of essential criticism, "a disinterested
endeavour "—again to revert to an old formula of Matthew
Arnold's—"to learn and propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world."

XIX. THE PRIMITIVE SOUL

This review of Professor Lévy-Bruhl's L'AME PRIMITIVE, as
translated by Lilian A. Clare, under the title, THE "SOUL" OF THE
PRIMITIVE, appeared in the New York BOOK LEAGUE MONTHLY, during, I
believe, 1928.

LUCIEN LEVY-BRUHL is a professor at the Paris Sorbonne, esteemed
in France and with a wide reputation abroad. His general
philosophic attitude is Positivist—though he would not
endorse all the doctrines of Auguste Comte—and severely
rationalistic. His main subject of investigation is the "primitive
soul," and his method that of the library student. I am sometimes
inclined to regard him as the successor of my old friend, Professor
Letourneau, whose radiant and amiable countenance I still recall in
his study in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, lined with books from
floor to ceiling, wherein he spent the last quarter of the
nineteenth century in weaving a long series of works describing the
sociological evolution of mankind as an aspiring course from the
bestial to something like the angelic. Letourneau had been inspired
by the scientific evolutionists of England; he turned to
sociological ethnography in the Darwinian spirit, and he assumed
that the savage of to-day was identical with the primitive man.
Letourneau's activities were useful in their time, but his method
was too simple, too facile, too cheerfully optimistic. Lêvy-Bruhl,
who would certainly associate himself with the criticisms which may
now fairly be directed against Letourneau, is also an evolutionist,
but of Comtist rather than Darwinian complexion; he seeks to sift
his facts with more precise care, but he remains—and that is
a significant point I wish to emphasise—a man of the
study.

The doctrine which we specially associate with
Lévy-Bruhl—the doctrine to which he chiefly owes his
international fame—is that of the "pre-logical" nature of
thought in "primitive" man. This "prelogical" quality of the
savage's thinking (for Lévy-Bruhl cannot come near to "primitive"
thought save by assuming that the modern savage illustrates it) is
demonstrated by its acceptance of contradictions and
inconsistencies, as well as by a general tendency to be influenced
by what Lêvy-Bruhl vaguely but disapprovingly terms "mystic"
ideas.

With this thread as a clue, and well equipped by an earlier
training in metaphysics, Lévy-Bruhl links together and groups with
much subtlety a large number of the various and complicated beliefs
of those modern savages whom he considers entitled to represent the
"primitive soul." The present volume, L'Ame Primitive,
published in Paris two years ago, is the latest of a series,
beginning in 1913, which he has devoted to this task. Lilian Clare,
his devoted and skilful translator, now presents it in English. It
cannot fail to be read with interest and profit by all those who
are interested in the fascinating problems offered by the
consideration of the "soul," whatever meaning we may be disposed to
attach to that word. Lévy-Bruhl insists on the variety and
vagueness of the meanings which the untutored savage assigns to the
"soul." But have we, in civilisation to-day, attained a crystalline
precision in its definition?

There at once we are brought to the central idea which is
Lêvy-Bruhl's guiding clue through this labyrinth: the "prelogical"
mind. In philosophy it has sometimes been found quite possible to
choose a guiding principle which is itself of very fragile texture,
and to find that it leads to all sorts of interesting and valuable
truths. To mention two philosophers of the first calibre:
Schopenhauer's "Will" and Plato's "Ideas," though fictions of the
imagination, were fully justified. But in sociological science such
a process is more dubious, and we are entitled to inquire into the
precise nature and significance of this conception of the
"prelogical" mind.

One notes at the outset that "prelogical" implies a certain kind
of evolutionary progression, or else Lévy-Bruhl would have chosen
the more neutral term "alogical." A "prelogical" stage assumes a
succeeding "logical" stage. There, at once, we are filled with
doubts. For mind did not begin in the zoological series with Man.
Other animals, even when very remote from Man, have mental
activities. Moreover, their minds are not "prelogical" but
sometimes very logical indeed. "My cat," Unamuno remarks, "never
laughs or cries; he is always reasoning." Nothing indeed can exceed
the logical justice and precision of the domestic cat's mind, with
every purposive act measured and adjusted to the end to be
achieved. But we see the same logical activity in creatures far
more removed from Man than the cat. Fabre, with his ineradicable
prejudice against Darwinism, refused to admit the facts which show
that what we call "instinct" may vary accordingly as the situation
to be dealt with varies, and is thus simply reason, for reason one
might fairly regard as an instinct that varies with circumstances.
But Kingston, the latest scientific investigator of spiders and
ants, who in his just published book, Problems of Instinct and
Intelligence, subscribes to the view that "instinct" is frozen
intelligence, while agreeing that spiders are for the most part
blind machines, finds it impossible to deny that in some of his
experiments ants "well knew what they were doing and the reason why
they did it." That is to say, they do not entirely live in a
"prelogical" world, and we may even believe that they are as remote
from "mystical" vagaries as the most devout of Lêvy-Bruhl's
disciples could desire. But if the animal predecessors of primitive
Man can scarcely be considered "prelogical" in the Lêvy-Bruhlian
sense, still more doubtful is it whether his modern successors can,
in the same sense, be considered "logical." Lévy-Bruhl's conception
is that Man's mind has been progressing from a luxuriant
imaginative "primitive" stage, which was full of contradictions,
towards a stage in which reason rules and inconsistencies are not
tolerated: a culminating phase of scientific "positivism." It is
obvious that, in reality, we of to-day live in no such phase. A
narrowly "positivistic" scientific conception of the world,
refusing to admit anything unproved by science, or anything
apparently inconsistent with its proofs, is possessed by but a
small minority. Even among those who most genuinely accept the
claims of science and of reason, there are many who do not admit
that science and reason cover the whole of life, while there are
some—far from considering themselves reactionaries—who
vigorously repel any claim of science to decide on the essential
things of life. Lêvy-Bruhl holds that the true doctrine lies with
those who, like himself, uphold the most austere demands of Reason,
and that all the others are belated survivors from a primitive
state that is past. But is not this faith in "Reason" completely
arbitrary?

Since beginning to read Lévy-Bruhl's book, I have chanced to
come across a remark much to the present point by a distinguished
French critic of to-day who is discussing the work of exactly such
another ascetically positivist adherent to the faith in Reason. "It
is in the name of Reason," M. Jaloux well observes, "that St.
Thomas and the disciples of the Summa accept the truth of the
Church's teaching, and it is in the name of Reason that many others
refuse to believe in God. I think that the reasonable thing is to
avoid having too much confidence in Reason. Sometimes it seems to
me the most captious and elastic of all the forms of imagination."
The point could not be more clearly and concisely put, and it is
needless to say more.

It may now be clear, however, why it is that Levy-Bruhl's
doctrine of the "prelogical" mind has found little or no acceptance
among the actual investigators of the methods of thought and
behaviour among savages to-day. Lévy-Bruhl is felt to be a man of
dogma and a man of the study; his speculations—however
ingenious, suggestive, and helpful—cannot give us a true
picture of the real ordinary savage. We might similarly suppose a
savage philosopher studying the civilised mind by reading our
newspapers crammed with murders and outrages and all those
"amazing" occurrences by which journalism lives. He would find it
hard to believe that in civilisation, just as in his own savagery,
there are masses of people who live peaceful, harmless, and
uneventful lives. Nor does the average uncivilised man, any more
than the civilised, take his own beliefs in too solemnly literal a
manner. The Mohammedan in the desert who believes that the air is
full of djinns, and that it is dangerous even to throw away
a date stone, lives no less cheerful a life than the Christian who
believes that an everlasting lake of fire and brimstone awaits him
if he happens to tell a lie. Consistency cannot always be found in
civilisation, even among the ideas of the individual, and still
less when we compare the ideas of different individuals. Lêvy-Bruhl
regards it as characteristic of "primitive" men that their ideas of
the human spirit and its persistence after death are "vague,
confused, and often contradictory." But so are those of civilised
men, and a question on this point addressed to the first half-dozen
civilised persons at random would produce answers by no means
falling short of the savage's in these respects, and perhaps
excelling them. Lévy-Bruhl makes much of a distinction—which,
he believes, had previously "escaped nearly all observers
"—between the conception of the soul held by the "prelogical"
savage and that held by the civilised Christian missionary. To the
white man, he says, it is a question of dualism (a
perishable corporeal substance united to an imperishable spiritual
substance); to the savage it is a question of duality; that
is, all beings are homogeneous, nothing being purely material and
nothing purely spiritual, all possessing in varying degrees the
properties the civilised man ascribes to spirit alone. But an
opinion not far from this "prelogical" view has been held by many
men of eminent intellect in civilisation. Thus Milton rejected the
"common opinion" that man is "made up and framed of two distinct
and different natures as of soul and body," and held that "the
whole of man is soul and the soul man," at once individual,
animated, sensitive, and rational; it is a belief that some men of
positive science have favoured in more recent times, and it is hard
to see why such "duality" should be more "prelogical" than
"dualism."

Several chapters of this book are concerned with the savage's
conception of the individual and the group. In savage sociological
theory the group comes first and the individual almost nowhere. The
group is the real unit and the individual only an element of the
unit. In practice as well as in theory it is undoubtedly true that
individuality is largely subordinated in savage life. Yet hardly to
the extent that Lévy-Bruhl assumes, for the most competent
observers of actual savage life (like Dr. Malinowski) find no lack
of individual temperaments and a considerable aptitude to reach
individual gratification, even in opposition to the will of the
group. A high degree of individual development and individual
freedom is rare in savage life. But it is also rare in civilised
life. There is a perpetual struggle on the part of the finer
elements in civilisation to attain freedom for individuality, and
there has yet been no civilisation in which the highest
manifestations of individuality have escaped persecution, exile,
even death, or, at least, during life, complete neglect.

But the reason for the oppression of individuality is the
immense value of solidarity. The savage instinctively devises
fantastic reasons for cultivating solidarity, but even if the
reasons are unreasonable fictions, their motives are reasonable and
the end attained socially desirable. Lévy-Bruhl wisely refrains
from grappling with Vaihinger on this point, for if he did his
conception of the "prelogical" would dissolve in his hands. It
seems indeed to argue some audacity on the part of the publishers
of the present volume to present to the American public so
disparaging a conception of the uniform social group, convicting
Main Street of savagery, to say nothing of those aspirations of
human solidarity which have often appealed so strongly to the
revolutionary idealist.

One is tempted, indeed, to reverse Lévy-Bruhl's theory of mental
progression in humanity, and to place at the beginning the simple
logical consistent positivistic attitude which he places at the
end. The lower animals are certainly more primitive than Man, and
it is among them that we can trace more clearly the simple
consistent logical attitude, the complete freedom from "mystical"
ideas. The savage is the pioneer of humanity in introducing a more
complex vision of the problems of life and society, though for a
large part he is doing so unconsciously and fantastically.
Civilised man to-day can use fictions, and know that he is doing
so, and that it is wise to do so; he can be inconsistent and
realise that such an attitude is required, since even our human
virtues are contradictory, and either for man or woman to be at
once just and generous, modest and brave, means holding opposites
in balance. And he can be thus illogical, because to-day he
realises, when not bound by the fetters of dogma, that the world
itself is illogical, even though it holds in it a thread of reason
which it is worth their while for living creatures to seek out and
use. Physicists to-day are able to maintain two contradictory
theories of the substance of the world and to believe that both are
right. The quantum theory explains some phenomena that the wave
theory cannot explain, and the wave theory explains some phenomena
that the quantum theory cannot explain. And the two theories are
irreconcilable. So that Professor Eddington has been led to suggest
that perhaps, after all, Nature is irrational. It may be a
contradictory Universe, with which we can only live in harmony by
being ourselves contradictory.

XX. BRIFFAULT'S "THE
MOTHERS"

This review of Robert Briffault's, THE MOTHERS: A STUDY OF
THE ORIGINS OF SENTIMENTS AND INSTITUTIONS, was published in the
New York BIRTH CONTROL REVIEW for September 1928.

THIS huge work, covering in its three volumes nearly 2500 pages,
and representing an enormous amount of labour, was published a year
ago. It has attracted wide attention, but that attention has by no
means always been favourable. It has secured high praise from a
few, but more often it has been received coolly or with hostile
criticism. It was first called to my notice, immediately on
publication, by Mr. Austen Harrison, formerly the editor of the
English Review and himself the author of books on women's
questions; he wrote to me of The Mothers with enthusiasm.
But when I later came to read reviews of the book I found that by
most of the critics it was belittled. Now, after an interval, it
seems worth while to investigate the cause of this attitude and to
inquire how far it was justified.

The author of The Mothers, so far as one can learn, is a
physician who comes from New Zealand (though the name indicates a
French origin); he is not known in connection with medicine, but is
the author of several non-medical books, and it is clear that he is
a person of intensely active mind who has moved much about the
world, was in the trenches during the war, and has acquired wide
interests. He is now settled in London, and states in a brief
pathetic passage of the Preface, which wins the reader's sympathy,
that the present work has been "completed amid great suffering. The
flight that began with still youthful buoyancy has been brought to
a conclusion on broken wings," adding that he has "worked
single-handed and been spared no drudgery."

Under all these circumstances it could not but be a pleasure to
congratulate Dr. Briffault without qualification on bringing to a
conclusion a great and memorable enterprise. His main thesis is
that the part played by woman at the early stages of human culture
has been under-estimated, because, since we live under a
long-established patriarchal order, only to-day undergoing
modification, we find it hard to understand how there could ever
have been a time when the influence of woman in the community,
based on descent in the female line, was equal to, or greater than,
that of man, so that what may be called a matriarchal order
prevailed. This was rendered possible by the great fact of
maternity at a period when paternity was uncertain and even unknown
(conception being attributed to other causes), and to all the
various industries, sentiments, and activities, of the first
importance for early man, which radiated from maternity (and among
its irradiations Briffault, with many other writers, counts love),
while, before war had developed or the idea of property passed
beyond its elementary phase, there was no occasion for the
dominance of man. So that "the social characters of the human mind
are, one and all, traceable to the operations of instincts that are
related to the functions of the female and not to those of the
male." With a settled agricultural life, the development of war, of
property, and the initiation of a family life in which the husband
founded the home and brought the wife into it, an almost
revolutionary change occurred in the social order.

That is a thesis which is not new and has often been vigorously
opposed at various points as contrary to many established facts.
But, while it is impossible to speak with certainty regarding the
social life of early man, there may yet be much in the argument
which contains possible and even probable truth, often overlooked
and needing to be brought forward in order to modify the common
tendency to set up a patriarchal order as almost a law of nature.
It has usually been associated with Bachofen, who wrote nearly a
century ago, with much erudition, though without the benefit of the
more critical information which has since been accumulated, and in
an atmosphere of mysticism which served to discredit with most
later investigators the primitive gynecocracy, or rule of woman,
which he believed he had discerned; there are still many who more
or less follow the views put forward by Bachofen, while other
authorities of at least equal or greater weight, admitting the
frequent existence of descent in the maternal line, deny the
conclusions that have been drawn from it. There was, therefore,
ample room for an investigator who, recognising the pioneering
insight of Bachofen, would discard his romantic extravagance, and
seek to give force to the argument he presented in a more moderate
form and in the light of later information.

It is unfortunate that Dr. Briffault, in taking up this task not
only with enthusiasm and industry, but a notable equipment of acute
intelligence and varied outlook, should have been seriously
handicapped by defects of literary temperament. I say "literary
temperament," because I know nothing whatever of his personal
temperament. It is the writer alone whom I am able to take into
consideration.

Dr. Briffault, it is clear from his previous books as well as
from The Mothers, is a writer who is temperamentally
attracted to the paradoxical. This is not the same as being
heterodox, for a thinker may wander from the orthodox path without
putting himself into violent opposition to it, and even without
knowing that he is wandering. But to be paradoxical involves a
deliberate and violent challenge to what is regarded as orthodox. A
previous work, Psyche's Lamp, Dr. Briffault himself
described as a challenge to the most fundamental of all notions,
that of individuality, which he considered a mere abstraction, and
he there preluded his later attack on the patriarchal social order
by abolishing the conflict with what he called the "patriarchal
universe." Dr. Briffault likes to feel that he is standing alone
against the world. He puts forward this thesis as his own
discovery, without explaining that, though not in precisely the
same form, there are a number of distinguished workers in this
field who, in one form or another, have argued along similar lines
to his own. Indeed, of some of the most notable of them he speaks
disparagingly, and even his solitary tribute to Bachofen is
relegated to a footnote.

As regards the protagonists on both sides, one may add, it seems
characteristic that Dr. Briffault never attempts to estimate the
relative weight of their opinions. He quotes a vast number of
authors—between two and three thousand—but he seems
unable to see the trees for the wood. There are a dozen or so
workers in this field in recent times to whose judicial opinion
much weight must be attached, even if they are not accepted, but
there is no sign that Dr. Briffault distinguishes them in the
jungle, even when they favour his own views; he is liable to treat
any of them with a supercilious air of easy authority, or, if he
distinguishes, that is only to be known by the frequency with which
he attacks them.

This literary temperament may be described as hyperaesthetic.
Dr. Briffault is intensely alive and sensitive to the ideas that
strike him. But he responds to them excessively. So that while he
is perpetually putting forth views that, though they may not be
new, have been freshly realised by himself, and may well contain
overlooked elements of truth, he tends to put them forth
extravagantly—frequently with the aim of contradicting
somebody else—and so, in the eyes of the judicious, he is apt
to prejudice a point that was well worth making. To take a simple
and obvious example, he insists, more than otice, on the opposition
between the sexual impulse and the mating impulse, and is even
hereby carried to the wild assertion (which he elsewhere
contradicts) that in savage matings there is no sexual selection.
If he had been content to say they were distinct, we should
agree that here is a distinction we must always recognise. But it
is not enough for Dr. Briffault to point out, as he rightly does,
that the two impulses are distinct; such a mild statement he fails
to find sufficiently extreme, and twenty pages farther on he
asserts that there is "direct contrast and antagonism."

These hyperaesthetic reactions are specially notable in Dr.
Briffault's attitude towards fellow-workers, and they are the more
pronounced the more eminent the worker who calls them out.
Professor Westermarck, perhaps the most distinguished authority in
this field, and a worker who possesses in the highest degree those
qualities of judicial caution and moderation in which Dr.

Briffault is not conspicuous, is repeatedly called out for
pedagogic castigation, and never with the smallest recognition of
the great qualities which have assured for Westermarck's history of
marriage its high reputation. The criticisms, it is possible, may
often be justified, but I may note that I tried to verify one of
them, where Dr. Briffault reprovingly states that Westermarck gives
"an incorrect reference to H. H. Ellis." But on looking the point
up, the reference is found to be perfectly correct; the
incorrection is Briffault's. In another place, where an absurd
argument is attributed to another cautious and distinguished
authority, Dr. Moll, the absurdity is found due to an extravagant
twist which has been given to Moll's statement.

It may be simplest for me to illustrate these traits of Dr.
Briffault's mind by his method of treating a statement of my own.
Many years ago I pointed out that the primitive rule of
exogamy—or marriage outside the immediate group—may
have its biological basis (though not its complete explanation, for
there the active human intelligence came into inventive play) in
the fact that the mating impulse is felt more strongly towards
comparative strangers than towards those who have been brought up
in the same household, or have been companions from childhood. This
is not, as Dr. Briffault thinks, a "theory," but a statement of
fact which most people can confirm out of their own early
experiences. It is not specially a phenomenon of civilisation, for
it rests on an instinctive basis which is independent of culture.
It is a common experience in all isolated communities that when a
young woman from outside is introduced she has, without the
exercise of any coquetry, all the young men at her feet. In
disputing this fact, Dr. Briffault fails to see that he thereby
deprives his own conception of primitive society of its biological
basis, and leaves it in the air, for his view is that, in the first
stages of human life, women always chose as their sexual partners
men who were strangers and whom they refused to live with,
preferring to live with their children among their own blood
relations. That the immature instincts of children tend to have
what is, not quite correctly, termed an "incestuous" direction, is,
thanks to the Freudians, now well recognised; it is equally well
recognised that, with the attainment of adolescence and the normal
susceptibility to the stronger attractions of the less familiar
mating object, there is a sharp reaction against the immature and
childish tendencies, and a horror of incest arises. All this is, to
an impartial observer, simple, natural, and universal. It
represents the general rule, to which there are, of course, endless
exceptions, early "fixations," more or less pathological, which are
never overcome. To bring them forward, as Dr. Briffault does, to
invalidate the general rule, is idle and scarcely intelligent,
though, in order to strengthen his opposition to my representation
of this rule, he states that I had put it forward as
"indispensable;" needless to say, I have never said anything
so absurd. Impelled by the same motive, he makes the equally
baseless assertion that I had been referring "exclusively to the
operation of the sexual instincts of the male." On the contrary,
this instinct is probably even more marked in the female, and
numberless women, when urged by a suitor they have known from
childhood, have felt, and often said, "I am very fond of you, but
I don't want to marry you—I know you so well!" In
other words, they feel that such a union would have a kind of
"incestuous" character. Dr. Briffault, however, might seem to
belong to that class of controversalists who hold that we should
reply not to what our adversary actually said, but to what he ought
to have said if we are to triumph over him.

That supposition would be unjust, for it is probable that Dr.
Briffault is simply carried away by his special temperament to
excesses which he had not deliberately planned. But we may now
realise why it is that his achievement in producing this memorable
work has not been received with all the applause which it may seem
to merit. He has unfairly disparaged the fellow-workers before
whom, in the first place, his book naturally comes for judgment,
and—unkiudest cut of all—he has even contrived to
alienate in some measure the very sex which he has come forth to
champion. His aim is the justification of the primitive place of
women in society, at a period when culture was not the outcome of
masculine activity but mainly an achievement of women. "Social
organisation itself was the expression of feminine functions. Those
social sentiments without which no aggregate of individuals can
constitute a society were the immediate derivatives of the feelings
which bind the mother and her offspring, and consisted originally
of these, and of these alone. Upon them the superstructure of
humanity, and the powers and possibilities of its development,
ultimately rest." But in the establishment of the patriarchal
system and the civilisation bound up with it—for neither of
which he feels unqualified admiration and both which he seems to
think likely to disintegrate in their present form—Dr.
Briffault can assign but a small part to woman, while he magnifies
the part women have played in primitive magic, and makes no attempt
to conceal the facts, which are indeed undisputed, concerning the
licentiousness of women among various uncivilised peoples. It was
no doubt inevitable that such a champion should arouse horror in
the breasts of many feminists, who still cherish the ideals of prim
feminine respectability which are said to have prevailed in England
during the Victorian Age.

When we have thus disposed of Dr. Briffault's critics by
accounting for their existence, and at the same time put aside his
own theories concerning the sexual order of a Palaeolithic Age from
which no documents for proof or disproof exist, it is possible to
speak of this work with genuine admiration. Every page of it may be
read with enjoyment, and there are few readers who will not derive
knowledge or suggestion from some of them, provided they approach
them with an alert critical sense. This author possesses
wide-ranging interests, supported by an immense and indiscriminate
familiarity with their literature (which he generally quotes with
marvellous accuracy), and combined with an athletic intelligence
which moves easily in this wilderness of quotations, constantly
throwing out new ideas or reviving old ideas, illustrating them
from a fresh angle or attaching to them an unexpected importance.
Moreover, this book is the work of a brilliant writer, one may even
say a literary artist, and if his ideas are at times obscure, and
he sometimes contradicts himself, there is no obscurity in his
expression. Every chapter may be read with ease as well as with
pleasure.

It is characteristic of the author's intellectual grasp that his
eagerness to penetrate to the origins of society does not preclude
an insight into the present. "We live," he remarks in his final
chapter, "in a patriarchal society in which patriarchal principles
have ceased to be valid." We cannot, even if it were desirable,
return to any earlier order, but we can mould the future. Men can
unlearn the patriarchal theory, and women—mothers in the
spirit even when not in the flesh—can learn that "all racial
ideas that are worth while are ultimately identical with their own
elemental instincts;" in throwing off their economic dependence
they are rescuing from the like thraldom the deep realities of
which they were the first "mothers." Both sexes alike, putting
aside all efforts to impose their own ideals on the opposite sex
and substituting mutual co-operation for sex antagonism, can work
together for the future evolution of society. They can so organise
marriage that it ceases to be an "institution" for the State to
regulate, and assumes new forms which the State cannot institute,
though it is its duty to register them. "It is towards new forms of
marriage that existing conditions point. Individual men and women
differ profoundly in their fitness for one form or other of sexual
association; what is in a given instance desirable is quite
unsuitable in others." This final chapter may be read with profit
even by those who are least inclined to assume a primitive rule of
women.

When from this final standpoint we survey The Mothers, we
cannot fail to recognise that, notwithstanding all the criticism
his work has been subjected to, Dr. Briffault may view with
satisfaction the outcome of his labour and thought. He has produced
a book which no investigator in these fields can henceforth afford
to neglect.

XXI. AN INQUIRY INTO
MARRIAGE

Published in the SATURDAY REVIEW for 6th April 1929, in
review of Dr. G. V. Hamilton's memorable work, A RESEARCH IN
MARRIAGE.

THE sex life of ordinary men and women has been the last subject
in the world for the cool, investigating hands of science to touch.
Strange, perhaps, that the inquisitive thirst for knowledge should
neglect precisely that subject which so many people regard as of
the first importance in their personal lives. It might appear to an
outsider a proof of the exalted idealism of an extraordinary
species of beings who went to endless trouble to analyse the
composition of the stars and were completely indifferent to the
analysis of the conditions needed to secure their own personal
welfare. But the motives of this neglect were not so lofty as the
outsider might imagine. There was more of terror than of heroism in
the attitude. Men had so surrounded the most intimate part of their
bodies with hideous bogies and taboos that they were frightened at
the spectre they had themselves evoked, and it was merely the
refuge of cowardice that they sought in stellar space.

So not until about half a century ago was there any systematic
attempt to investigate the psychology of sex-love, and then it was
confined to the most morbid and outrageous forms of that psychology
(as embodied in Krafft-Ebing's Psycho-pathia Sexualis), as
though by an instinctive desire to indicate that we were here
concerned with phenomena in which ordinary humanity had no part. In
my own Studies were embodied the first attempts to present
the sex histories of "normal" people, and at the same time to
indicate that there is no line of demarcation between "normal" and
"abnormal." Meanwhile, the far-reaching speculations of Freud have,
on the one hand, almost revolutionised some departments of sex
investigations, while, on the other hand, various methodical
inquiries have been set up for the acquisition of knowledge on
special points; notable among these are the results of the
questionnaires issued from New York by Dr. Katharine
Davis.

But now it is possible to chronicle an investigation, again in
America, which is an advance on all that has gone before in this
field. The investigator, Dr. G. V. Hamilton, is not unknown. Ten
years ago he was the pioneer in exploring the sex life of the
higher apes under conditions which were an attempt to approximate
to the natural conditions, a field in which many have since
followed him. Now, turning to another, and to ourselves specially
interesting, branch of the Primates, he has inaugurated a yet more
fruitful series of observations. The distinguishing mark of his
investigation is its more rigidly systematic and comprehensive
character. In this way, however it may fall short, it becomes a
more nearly scientific attempt to reach the facts than any that
went before. We can never be sure that individuals' histories are
typical, while questionnaires cannot be adequately
controlled and need to be very limited in scope. Dr. Hamilton
secured 100 married men and 100 married women (not necessarily
husbands and wives to each other), of good social standing, some of
them persons of note, and all presumably normal. An extremely
lengthy series of sometimes very intimate questions was carefully
prepared, covering all the main aspects of the sex life. These were
submitted to the long-suffering victims of this inquisition under
Dr. Hamilton's personal supervision. When the answers were finally
obtained (though all the questions were not answered by all the
subjects), these answers were elaborately summarised and analysed
by Dr. Hamiltons' assistants, and the results appear as
percentages. The whole investigation has now been published in New
York, and, though highly condensed, it fills a substantial volume
of nearly six hundred pages.

The obvious criticism of these results is that the subjects are
too few, the more so as for many questions the answers are
defective or ambiguous. When we come to the minute shades of sexual
feeling or practice, and to the correlations between them which Dr.
Hamilton's assistants have worked out with so much skill, lucidity,
and patience, we are especially uncertain as to the validity of the
results. We should feel more confidence if the subjects could have
been increased to the number of a thousand. But this criticism is
silenced at the outset by the frankness with which Dr. Hamilton
himself acknowledges its force. He repeatedly states throughout
that he is not claiming to put forward any final conclusions. It is
the right attitude, and in adopting it the author creates
beforehand an atmosphere favourable to the acceptance of his
results.

Dr. Hamilton is, indeed—as we may clearly
recognise—an absolutely ideal investigator at the stage of
development which "sexology" has to-day reached. The pioneering
days are past. There are no more continents to discover here, and
the methods of the adventurous pioneer can no longer be profitably
adopted. It is the highly trained surveyor of the new land that we
now require. No one in this field of methodical scientific survey
seems to be so well equipped to-day as Dr. Hamilton. This equipment
does not consist merely of his training in comparative and morbid
psychology. That would not suffice. Indeed, no scientific
discipline is in itself enough. For the investigator in this field
a particular disposition is needed which no training can yield, an
attitude, that is to say, of humane sympathy and insight, of
freedom from conventional prejudice, of instinctive caution in
drawing conclusions. These are qualities that can scarcely be
acquired without the right innate disposition. Dr. Hamilton's
temper of mind is well revealed by his attitude towards Freud,
always a test of the investigator in this field. It is at once
appreciative and critical; he realises the magnitude of Freud's
achievement and is willing to follow up Freud's stimulating
suggestions, but he retains his own freedom and independence. He
shows to how considerable an extent hidden psycho-dynamic
mechanisms may be discovered, quite independently of
psychoanalysis, by what he terms "non-mystical methods of
research." It may be noted here, in passing, that this is a
questionable use of the much abused word "mysticism," and Freud
would certainly protest at being described as a "non-scientific
student of human nature," as he claims to be a man of science,
neither more nor less.

These unfortunate qualifications might well have been omitted
without injury to Dr. Hamilton's position. It is possible, indeed,
that he himself would now admit this, for even in the brief period
since his investigation was completed he has declared that it has
had the result of causing him to move more closely to the Freudian
outlook.

It is impossible to summarise this Research, for the
volume is itself a summary, and contains 468 tables, besides other
figures and correlations. The results are at innumerable points of
value and often of novelty; even when not new they bring out points
with a new precision. Thus the significance, even for later life,
of opportunities of obtaining early information on matters of sex
is clearly revealed. Only 5 per cent, men and 38 per cent, women
could definitely report that they had no occasion in childhood to
experience curiosity concerning the conformation of the opposite
sex; and the importance of this early sex knowledge is well
indicated by the finding that 80 per cent, of those women who knew
before the age of six where children came from, show adequate
sexual capacity in their married life, but only 42 per cent, of
those who never knew till after the age of twelve; while those who,
as children, met with encouragement to their questions, have a much
more satisfactory sex life after marriage than those whose parents
were embarrassed or stiff in face of their children's questions. It
appears that 31 per cent, of the women, although of the well-to-do
and educated class, had received no preparation whatever for the
appearance of menstruation. Altogether Dr. Hamilton considers that
not 5 per cent, of his subjects have entirely escaped damage from
some injurious but preventable influence of early life. It is to be
remembered that they are men and women of more than average
intelligence and attainments, more or less importantly occupied in
the world. They correspond to our own upper middle-class
people—the section most socially influential—and if, as
we may assume, conditions are in this respect much the same among
us, many things in English life may become clearer to us.

What is the proportion of married people who really obtain
satisfaction in marriage? Hamilton finds that 63 husbands and 47
wives consider their marriage successful or fairly successful. He
has a very definite impression that the wives in his
group—and I believe the impression would have remained had he
gone beyond his group—have been more seriously disappointed
in their marriages than the men; 39 husbands have no cause for
dissatisfaction, but only 25 wives; 11 wives find "everything
unsatisfactory," but only 2 husbands. Hamilton was rather surprised
to find that a man is more likely to be happy in marriage with a
woman who is sexually inadequate than a woman is with a sexually
inadequate husband. It is interesting, in view of the strict
prohibition in the United States of the publication of the methods
of birth-control, that as many as 92 per cent, of the men and 87
per cent, of the women use contraceptives—probably as large a
proportion as in England, where we have no such prohibition. Dr.
Hamilton believes that the strange latter-day opposition to
birth-control—for as Carr-Saunders and others have shown, the
limitation of offspring by one method or another has always been
accepted in earlier stages of civilisation—is the greatest
obstacle in the way of solving one of the major problems of married
life, and he finds that as many as 21 of 81 women in his
group—over 25 per cent.—have had one or more abortions
performed.

Dr. Hamilton's subjects are men and women mostly under forty
years of age, all living in New York City, and some of them persons
of considerable achievement in the world. They are, therefore, full
of significant instruction for us as being among the finer
representatives of the new adult generation, for we may reasonably
suppose that they enable us to realise the direction in which the
world is to-day moving. (I may remark that in England my own
observations, though I cannot present results so comprehensive and
precise as Dr. Hamilton's, harmonise with his at all main points.)
In view of the common opinion concerning the prevalence of sexual
licence to-day, it is instructive to observe that 41 per cent, of
the husbands and 53 per cent, of the wives had never had any sexual
relationship before marriage; and 46 per cent, of the men and 61
per cent, of the women never except with the future partner in
marriage. Dr. Hamilton's analysis, moreover, enables him to
separate the younger from the elder of his subjects. He is thus
able to ascertain that men of the younger generation are more
"conventional" as regards pre-marital sexual intercourse—that
is to say are more chaste—than men of the older generation.
But not so the women. "Our men are becoming more virtuous and our
women less so." The result is that among persons bom in 1891, or
later, the percentage of both men and women who have not had sexual
intercourse before marriage is about the same. James Hinton, who,
more than half a century ago, was the passionate though sometimes
wrong-headed pioneer of sexual reform, used to be filled with wrath
at the spectacle of the contrast between the undue licence and
undue restraint—unequally shared by the sexes—which
marked the society of his time. His spirit might have been soothed
if he had known how true a pioneer he was of a swiftly approaching
future.

Dr. Hamilton's results will doubtless seem shocking to many
readers; but, though sometimes even himself a little surprised, he
wisely remains an optimist. "The educated younger men and women,"
he writes, "with their serious-minded but frankly experimental
attitude towards sex, refuse to be superstitiously moralistic; but
they also refuse to be either obscenely furtive or inexpediently
defiant and disorderly. They are trying to be sane and
broad-minded." That may be said to be the final moral of a
memorable research which is as instructive in its facts as it is
reasonable and humane in its outlook.

XXII. THOMAS HARDY AND THE HUMAN
PAIR

These pages were written as an Introduction to the English
translation of Pierre d'Exideuil's LE COUPLE HUMAIN DANS L'OEUVRE
DE THOMAS HARDY, published in 1930. They were there printed with
the omission of two or three sentences, which are here
included.

IT is common to speak of Thomas Hardy as a "pessimist." It is
not a description he himself accepted. One may well go farther and
say that for anyone who is concerned with the spectacle of life the
term "pessimism" is as much out of place as the term "optimism."
The person who believes that everything in the world is for the
best can only have known one hemisphere of it, and only have felt
half of what it offers; he is a maimed and defective being who has
never in any complete sense lived. And the person who believes that
everything in the world is for the worst is similarly one-sided in
his vision, and semi-ignorant in his experiences. No one, indeed,
who has really caught a glimpse of the infinitely varied universe
of experience in which we live, can apply to it such demoded
metaphysical terms as "optimism" and "pessimism." It is true, as a
distinguished French critic has lately remarked:

"Humanity does not give birth in joy, and even the novelists
most optimistic in their philosophy, like André Gide, have yet
written bitter things. The great masterpieces of fiction reach us
effaced by time and commentaries, but think of the corrosive acid
that poisoned on their first appearance Les Liaisons
Dangereuses or Le Rouge et Le Noir. Nothing more
atrociously desperate than The Mill on the Floss, or Le
Cousin Pons, or The Possessed." Jaloux is here refuting
the charge of "pessimism" brought against the novels of Julien
Green, but he might have been speaking of Hardy or even of
Shakespeare. For Shakespeare no more becomes a pessimist by virtue
of Lear than an optimist by virtue of Midsummer Night's
Dream. The artist lifts us into a region where these
metaphysical distinctions are meaningless, and we may well feel
sorry for the simple folk who can turn from the radiant
exhilaration of Hardy's art and mutter "Pessimist!"

It is another matter to say that life is a tragedy and a comedy,
and, often enough, both together. There is an inescapable logic of
sequences in it, and there is a wild absurdity; there is anguish
and there is joy; there is, in the end, the serene contemplation of
a whole in which all the varied elements fall into place. That is
how those who approach life naturally—that is to say,
unobsessed by philosophical dogmas—inevitably feel, whether
or not they happen to be artists: as a tragedy, and also at times a
farce, a source of delight, sometimes of horror, even, sometimes of
irony—in short, as Dante phrased it, a "divine comedy." Life
has indeed always been so for the natural man, from whatever Adam
and Eve you choose to trace him.

It was so that life was for Hardy. He interested himself a
little in philosophy, and more in art? as the years went on he
interested himself in fiction as an art, his own in particular, and
even wrote suggestively about it. But, whether or not he was a
great artist, he was not a philosopher. He was a natural and simple
man as free from the pretentiousness of "high art" as from any
other pretence, so modest and human as to feel hurt by the clamour
of fools around his Jude the Obscure. Hardy was not a child
of culture nor even, one sometimes thinks, a well-trained workman
in literature. He had never been subjected to any discipline,
scarcely, so far as one can see, even in architecture; his
education was mainly the outcome of a random, inquisitive,
miscellaneous reading, and the love-letters he wrote in youth to
the dictation of unschooled peasant girls (like Richardson and like
Restif de la Bretonne) may well have been an important part of it.
His stories lapse at times into extravagance or absurdity. His
style, exquisite at moments, is often (though this may be justified
by his belief that "a living style lies in not having too much
style—being, in fact, a little careless") weak, feeble,
careless. It is genius that carries him through. And of its
possession he seemed mostly unconscious.

His modest, quiet, smiling simplicity was the dominant
impression the man made, at all events in earlier days, when one
met him. I only knew him slightly—a few meetings, an
occasional letter—and my most vivid memory dates from a long
afternoon spent alone with him as far away as some forty years,
before he had become famous. (I had, not long before, in the
Westminster Review for April 1883, published an article on
his novels which was one of the earliest serious appreciations of
his work and my own earliest long essay.) Yet even so brief a
meeting may suffice to furnish a key to a writer's work, and to
reveal the quality of the atmosphere in which that work moves.

The tragi-comedy of life, its joy and its pain, most often have
their poignant edge at the point of sex. That is especially so when
we are concerned with a highly sensitive, alert, rather abnormal
child of nature, with the temperament of genius. Such we in part
know, in part divine, that Hardy was, though always reticent about
any autobiographical traits in his novels. Every reader of Mrs.
Hardy's Early Life of Thomas Hardy has noted the statement
that "a clue to much in his character and action throughout his
life is afforded by his lateness of development in virility, while
mentally precocious. He himself said humorously in later times that
he was a child till he was sixteen, a youth till he was
five-and-twenty, and a young man till he was nearly fifty." The
statement may be vague, but it indicates an element of abnormality
such as we are apt to find in genius; some such element is indeed
an inevitable concomitant of the special sensitiveness and new
vision of genius—the new vision of things seen at an angle
slightly, yet significantly, different from that at which the
average man is placed. For genius feels the things we all feel, but
feels them with a virginal freshness of sensation, a new pungency
or a new poignancy, even the simplest things, the rustling of the
wind in the trees or over the heather, which become, since Hardy
has revealed them to us, an experience we had never before
known.

It is in the problems of the relations of men and women that, as
we might expect, these qualities of Hardy's special genius reach
their full expression. That cannot fail to have been observed by
all those who have discussed his work in fiction. But I doubt if it
has ever been so thoroughly and so frankly discussed as in Le
Couple Humain dans l'Oeuvre de Thomas Hardy, by M. Pierre
d'Exideuil, recently published in Paris and here presented to the
English reader. Nothing of this critic's work had come to my notice
before I read Le Couple Humain, and I do not quite
understand by what path he reached Hardy. However that may have
been, it is clear that M. d'Exideuil has gained a fairly complete
mastery of his subject and a considerable acquaintance with the
numerous writings of earlier critics in the same field. He is the
first writer to investigate Hardy's art in relation to the sexual
theme at its centre. It is worth noting that this task falls to a
fellow-countryman of Stendahl and of Proust, and so many other fine
analysts of love. The English critic still always remains rather
shy and awkward, a little Puritanical, in front of the problems of
sex. There lingers in him a mediaeval feeling that to deal simply
and seriously with sex is unwholesome. He seems to feel an impulse
either to moralise or to display an ostentatious playfulness, which
sadly often becomes coarse and crude. Throughout the whole history
of French literature, even from the days of Montaigne and Petit
Johan de Saintré, it has been natural for the Frenchman to deal
seriously with a group of problems which certainly, for nearly all
of us, are at one time or another the most serious we encounter in
life. (I may note parenthetically that Hardy's characters are
largely of the distinctly Celtic type of Western England and that
Hardy himself, who felt in close touch with the great French
novelists, liked to recall that he was remotely of French blood.)
M. d'Exideuil is dealing with a foreign writer, but he is following
a track marked out by his own countrymen.

He follows it worthily, no doubt, but we are not bound to accept
all the arguments set forth in this book. At some points, indeed,
one or another may unintentionally mislead the reader.

It is the business of the analytic critic to trace out the
underlying tendencies, the more or less unconscious ideas, held
beneath and within the work of art he is discussing. In so doing he
may easily give the impression that the artist himself deliberately
built up his work on the foundation of these tendencies, and
intentionally used the ideas as the framework of his structure.
That is not so; and certainly not so for an artist as spontaneous
and wayward as Hardy, who used ideas and theories, by afterthought,
as illustrations or decorations of his stories, not as their
framework. The artist, we must never forget, is simply a man who
looks at life through the medium of a personal temperament, and is
able to describe what it looks like as seen by him. But the artist
himself may not know what it looks like from outside. As Hardy once
wrote to me: "They [novelists] are much in the position of the man
inside the hobbyhorse at a Christmas masque, and have no
consciousness of the absurdity of its trot, at times, in the
spectators' eyes." It was not, indeed, any absurdity in my vision
of his work that he was criticising but rather an appreciativeness
which, he modestly said, "seems in many cases to create the
beauties it thinks it perceives." The critic of literature,
however, is in the same position as the grammarian of language. The
grammarian patiently observes language and finds that certain rules
hold good, in general, for its use. But the rules he evolves from
observation of the common uses of language are not present to the
minds of those who invented and spoke the language; they come
after, not before, its creation. And similarly, the rules the
critic finds in the novelist's art, however justly they may define
the general methods of that art, were not present to the artist's
mind; they come after, not before, the creation of that art. We
must bear that in mind when M. d'Exideuil so lucidly expounds to us
what he finds in Hardy's novels.

All those who have ever taken a real interest in Hardy's work
will enjoy this intimate study of what cannot but be regarded as
one of the most significant aspects of that work. But even those
readers who take no special interest in Hardy's novels may yet find
much that is profitable here. For here we are concerned with the
central situations of life, stated in terms of fictional creation
but none the less situations which most of us have had to deal
with. The men whom Hardy brings before us have sometimes been
criticised as rather pale and featureless in character. Many years
ago I remarked that men of the Wilhelm Meister and Daniel Deronda
class were his favourite heroes. He wrote in reply: "I think you
are only saying in another way that these men are the modern
man—the type to which the great mass of educated modern men
of ordinary capacity are assimilating more or less." Evidently it
was not on the same plane that he saw women. The problems of love
he presents, therefore, are largely those of the conflict between
the modern man and a mate who retains the incalculable impulses of
a more elemental nature. Hardy's statement of these situations is
all the more instructive by virtue of his concentration on this
primitive feature of human character. In old days Hardy's vision of
the primitive and elemental, as manifested in women, was resented
by many; feminists were wont to compare Hardy's women, to their
disadvantage, with Meredith's. From the ethical standpoint that
preference for Meredith's women was then justifiable. To-day,
perhaps, when we no longer need to rebel against Victorianism, and
are able with him "to see beauty in ugliness," we may view the
psychological traits of Hardy's women without prejudice, and even
recognise in them an element of permanent veracity.

XXIII. THE PROPOSAL TO LEGALISE
STERILISATION: A CRITICISM

In 1930 the Eugenics Society set up a Committee for
Legalising Eugenic Sterilisation, and this Committee issued a
pamphlet, which was very widely circulated, entitled EUGENIC
STERILISATION, at the same time drafting a Bill to introduce into
Parliament with the object of "legalising" voluntary sterilisation,
under certain conditions, both among the general public and mental
defectives, without prejudicing the question whether such
operations are or are not already lawful. Such a Bill seemed to me
both absolutely unnecessary and thoroughly mischievous, not only
having no chance whatever of passing, but being calculated to
prejudice the very cause it was intended to further. My CRITICISM
was summarised in the EUGENICS REVIEW for January 1931, and
eventually the scope of the proposed Bill was limited to the
voluntary sterilisation of mental defectives under control, a
limitation which seemed to me to render the Bill less mischievous,
even if still undesirable. The Bill was duly introduced into the
House of Commons, and at once turned down by a large majority amid
an eloquent shower of fallacious arguments against sterilisation in
general. This is precisely what I had anticipated, and, as also I
had expected, the newspapers in their glib comments at once assumed
that at present "sterilisation is illegal."

I am pleased to be able to add that the Eugenics Society is
now trying to make clear that voluntary sterilisation, for any
desirable end, is already within the reach of those who can afford
the surgical fee, and that the Society's efforts in this matter are
simply directed to bring this trifling but important operation
within the reach of those who cannot afford to pay for it.

THE substitution in recent years of new methods of sterilisation
for the ancient method of castration has proved a reform with
far-reaching effects. The simple method of ligaturing sperm-ducts
or ovi-ducts (together with other methods, some of which may
onlybetemporary in their sterilising effects) has changed the whole
aspect of the question of sterilisation, to such a degree, indeed,
that it has not always been understood even by scientific men, who
have sometimes imagined all sorts of doubts and difficulties, as
the result of their imperfect knowledge. The old operation of
castration was definitely a mutilation, and, as we now know, it not
only abolished the procreative powers but it deprived the whole
organism of hormonic secretions which are essential for virility in
the wide sense, or for femininity. Sterilisation, as now practised,
involves the removal of no organ, essential or unessential; it not
only in no degree destroys sexual potency or sexual desire, but has
no hormonic influence, while it is (in the common form of
vasectomy) so trifling a proceeding that it has sometimes been
carried out without interference with the subject's daily work. It
thus has a wide range of usefulness both in health and disease. On
the one hand, it may be employed as a contraceptive by those who
already have a sufficiently large family, or have decided, on
whatever grounds, that they cannot have any family at all; on the
other hand, it is a main eugenic instrument for persons of
defective heredity, and though it can never be said with certainty
that congenitally defective parents will produce con-genitally
defective offspring, yet, in view of the risks, it is better to err
on the side of care than on the side of carelessness, whether or
not those who thus restrain the procreative impulse, during our
present rapidly rising tide of world-population, will be reckoned
to-morrow (as with our narrow notions of patriotism they will not
be reckoned to-day) benefactors of humanity.

Thus, while the old castration was regarded, not unnaturally, as
punishment and humiliation, the new sterilisation has no such
implications, but is a course of action neither dishonourable nor
degrading to the person who chooses it, while it is usually of
benefit to the society to which he belongs. But there is still a
tendency in the muddled public mind to confuse the new method with
the old. Those, therefore, who are engaged in establishing the new
order, whether by their operative activities or by their writings,
deserve all the encouragement and help which can be given them.
This is the feeling which seems to have animated the Committee.
Unfortunately, they have been ill advised in the retrograde steps
they have taken to manifest their sympathy. It scarcely appears
that they have had any due consultation with the workers who, for
years past, have been engaged with this matter.

One might have supposed that a Committee appointed to deal with
sterilisation by a Society which was originally established as a
Eugenics Education Society would have considered the opinion of
those numerous members of the Society who believe that the
differential birth-rate represents a possible menace for the future
community, and that they would have proposed measures to bring
sterilisation and other methods of contraception within practical
reach of those social strata which are to-day so urgently in need
of eugenic education. Nothing of the sort! They have preferred to
rake up antiquated legal objections on a mediaeval and earlier
foundation, or such as have been actually suggested as possible by
lawyers. They seem to overlook that it is a part of the business of
lawyers, on the one hand, to raise legal objections to a proposed
course of action, and, on the other hand, to raise
counter-objections to those objections; if it were not so, forensic
activities could not be exercised. But it is a piece of
supererogatory wickedness to exercise forensic ingenuity when there
is no question of bringing a case into court. Our best course,
obviously, is to wait for that improbable event. If it comes about,
then there is not the faintest doubt that the cause of voluntary
sterilisation will receive adequate support, moral and material, as
well as legal, and the Committee might have been expected to
organise such support.

As for the horrifying spectre of a maim, with which so
much play has been made, it is without bearing on the matter.
Mayhem, a word so ancient that its origin is unknown,
belongs to a primitive state of society totally unlike our own.
"The loss of those members which may be useful to a man in fighting
alone amounts to mayhem by the common law," Blackstone
stated; while as regards statute law, the Committee can only refer
to an Act, some seventy years old, relating to "assaulting and
wounding," ridiculous to apply to voluntary sterilisation, and
enacted long before modern sterilisation was heard of. The
Committee admits, indeed, that the only legal opinion on which it
relies, Lord Riddell's, is "based on legislation now obsolete." The
Committee further admits that "public benefit" is already
recognised by law, and even the most ancient among us are now
beginning to realise (what the younger generations do not doubt)
that the sterilisation of those unfit for procreation, and of those
unwilling to take on the responsibilities of parenthood, is
undoubtedly a matter of "public benefit."

The idea that the physician's part is limited to the treatment
of disease belongs to an ideology now out of date and is not in
accord with the views and the practices now tending to prevail,
which recognise the health of the community as well as the health
of the individual as coming under care. "If the physician limits
himself to the treatment of disease," Goldberg has lately well said
(Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, Nov.
1930), "he is leaving undone a large and splendid part of his work
for the welfare of the community." It is far more praiseworthy to
prevent disease and to act as medical adviser in the education of
the whole people. In their ex parte statement the Committee
refrain from indicating that surgeons have for long past been
carrying on sterilisation not only on persons in health, but also
in hospitals, in States of the U.S.A. which have no sterilisation
laws, as well as elsewhere; and if there is, notably, a
sterilisation law in California, that is because sterilisation is
there compulsory and consequently needs to be legalised. Voluntary
sterilisation is in no such need. Even the assumption that such a
need exists is mischievous, for it will spread abroad the notion
that sterilisation at present cannot be safely carried out. In the
unlikely event that a bill for "legalising" it is enacted, the
result may be equally mischievous; for we have to remember that it
must pass the scrutiny of opposing antiquated prejudices, on one
side those based on scientific notions of the past, on the other
those of popular ignorance. So that the only Act likely to emerge
would be one so hedged about with timorous precautions as to be
unworkable, especially in a land where individualism is still to
some extent cherished and bureaucracy abhorred. As has happened in
some American States, sterilisation, by being legalised, is itself
sterilised out of existence.

When we review the plea of the Committee for legalising
voluntary sterilisation (the plea on the compulsory side is almost
negligible) one cannot help remarking how sympathetically its
members would be rallied to a movement for legalising voluntary
decapillation. The two movements would be closely allied. From the
Committee's standpoint, in fact, it is decapillation that is more
urgently in need of legislation, in view of the frequency of the
operation and the lack of skill with which it is often carried out,
without any specific statutory authorisation. The legal position of
decapillation is, as the Committee would say, ambiguous, and to an
even greater degree than that of sterilisation; it is compulsory in
some circumstances, it is a punishable offence in others, while the
classic case of Samson under the scissors of Delilah definitely
brings in the problem of mayhem. It is painful to think of
the emotions which must be experienced by any member of the
Committee when he approaches a hairdresser's chair without having
secured and paid for a legal permit at the Decapillation Office he
has not yet been able to set up. It would be an evidently congenial
task for the Committee to work for the national control of bobbing,
shingling, and cropping. Many persons, both inside and outside the
Eugenics Society, consider that the Committee would be more
innocently employed than it is at present if it would agree to
reconstitute itself as the Committee for Legalising
Decapillation.

XXIV. THE PHILOSOPHIC PROBLEM OF
SEX

This paper was written at the request of the editor, Dr.
Raymund Schmidt, for the FORUM PHILOSOPHICUM, ire comment on a
paper by Professor Del-Negro, "Antinomien des Sexual-problems,"
which appeared in the same number, May 1931. As will be seen, I
could not altogether accept Del-Negro's view that the sex problem
presents antinomies for which there is no synthesis; but I agree
with his final conclusion that "the essential thing in life is not
the balance of happiness, but the greatest possible heightening of
personality."

THE phenomena of sex have furnished a problem which Man has
found puzzling ever since he began to reflect impersonally on his
own life. That was, no doubt, due to the special nature of these
phenomena, with their alternations of quiescence and explosiveness.
Sex, on the one hand, was seen to be essential to the construction
of society, and yet, on the other hand, it was constantly
threatening destruction to society. It is not surprising that the
earliest work of European literary art which has come down to us
(whatever economic or other significance we may now read into the
Iliad) is on the surface the poetic embodiment of a
philosophic reflection on the troublesome problem of sex. On the
plane of practice here was something which was always liable to
upset good order, and on the plane of thought it was always seeming
incompatible with that spiritual atmosphere which Man has always
been trying to secure for the operations of the intellect.

So that when Professor Del-Negro came forward with his
dysteleology of sex we have to admit at the outset that he is
following a venerable and legitimate tradition. As he views the
problem, what we have here is an antinomy, the clash of two
opposing and apparently incompatible elements, the biological
element of sexuality and the social element of culture, although
both of them have to be regarded as necessary, since otherwise we
merely have either licence or asceticism. Professor Del-Negro is
troubled because he is unable to find a synthesis of this antinomy.
In his trouble he finally wanders off the philosophical track and
talks about "compromises." The compromises he enumerates may be
excellent on ethical or practical grounds (as the present writer,
being English, and therefore holding the practical principle of
compromise in honour, will not attempt to deny). But they have
really nothing whatever to do with his philosophical problem. They
do not touch his "antinomy." The "compromise" of two opponents
merely attenuates them; it cannot remove the antinomy, if antinomy
there is. Professor Del-Negro has not solved the problem he has
devised; for, as I hope may appear in the sequel, the difficulty
here is an arbitrary invention.

To make that clear, I may be allowed to refer briefly to my own
experiences in studying the phenomena of sex. When in early life my
attention was drawn—as the attention of all of us is
drawn—to the contemplation of that subject, one thing above
all impressed me: Sex was submerged in morals and
metaphysics. I wanted a clear, precise, and calm presentation
of the facts, and all I could find were theories or precepts, with
no solid facts to support either. The moral superstructure was, it
is true, the larger, the loftier, the most top-heavy. But there
were also metaphysical theories, of which Schopenhauer's was at
that time doubtless the most brilliant and the most conspicuous,
though there were others more wildly fantastic. I would have none
of them, either the moralities or the metaphysics. Later it may be
quite right to make theories and moralities, I said to myself, but
first of all we must have the solid foundation on which to build:
let us find out the facts! That has been the aim inspiring all my
work in this field. I am well aware that the facts have not all
been found out; that is a process which goes on every day. But at
all events we can now say that it is going on, and going on
in a cool and clear atmosphere which in earlier years could never
be found for workers in this field. The way is opened for
moralities and theories of a sounder kind than once prevailed.

But although I have never actively and directly sought for a
philosophy of sex, no one whose vision is fairly wide can avoid
becoming aware of philosophical implications in all human affairs.
I have never sought for a "philosophy of sex," though such has been
attributed to me. But I have found a philosophic picture of the
world gradually being woven before my eyes, and in that picture, it
subsequently appeared, sex had its place. I should say that, for
me, a "philosophic" vision of the world simply means that further
step beyond the sciences which I am impelled to take in order to
make the separate activities I find in myself, and the separate
aspects I see in Nature, into a coherent whole, and so to
build for what I may call my "soul" a harmonious home in what I may
call the "Universe."

It is not necessary to expound that vision here, but I have to
refer to one aspect of it which was especially made clear to me
during the Great War. War and conflict, I found people saying on
both sides in that struggle—and saying with an air of
unchallengeable philosophic dogmatism—are the law of life,
from which there is no escape, and so the struggle was natural and
right.

Now all the explorations that I had ever been able to make along
the lines of science or the lines of art, led, as I could not fail
to admit, to what must be called conflict, meaning by that
term, the opposition of contrary forces. But I had never found them
lead to war. There is no war between the diastole of the heart and
its opposing systole; it would be absurd to call a war that
conflict between anabolism and katabolism which constitutes the
whole process of life from its outset. War, I found, was a highly
specialised and purely human activity, not even to be traced in
human history at the beginning, in its early forms probably being a
beneficial and socialising activity with no seriously harmful
results, but in its later overgrown and degenerate forms altogether
pernicious and anti-social. Conflict, on the other hand, is
beneficial and socialising, and even a law of all life. I had,
therefore, to make very clear to myself the confusion that is
involved by muddling up Conflict with War. Certainly war is one of
the many possible forms of conflict, but conflict is by no means
always war. War is not a form of conflict which is found normally
in science or in art. The element of violence, which essentially
characterises it, also serves to mark it off as a definite
species.

At this period, during the war, I wrote an essay on "The
Philosophy of Conflict," to try to clear up this confusion into
which both militarists and pacifists were at that time falling, the
militarists praising war because they confound it with conflict,
the pacifists condemning conflict because they confound it with
war. I tried to point out that, as defined by so great an authority
as Clausewitz, "War is an act of violence for the purpose of
compelling the adversary to fulfil our will," or, still earlier, by
the classical definition set forth by Cicero, and promulgated by
Grolius, war is "conflict by methods of violence." certatio per
vim. In other words, conflict is the genus of which war is
merely a species. We may condemn war, as a method of conflict by
violence, while maintaining inviolable the supremacy of conflict,
constituted by the balance or the struggle of opposing forces, not
merely as beneficial, but even as an indestructible element of our
universe, entering alike in the physical world and in organic life,
and essential to the maintenance of both.

"The conflict of forces," I wrote, "and the struggle of opposing
wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it
together. It is with the notions of effort and resistance that we
have formed our picture of the universe and that Darwin made
intelligible the manner in which we ourselves came to be. It is on
the like basis that our spiritual world rests. We create art on the
same plane and with the same materials as the world is created, and
it is precisely in the most fundamental arts—in architecture
and in dancing—that we find conflict and resistance most
definitely embodied. Every pose of the dancer is the achievement of
movement in which the maximum of conflicting muscular action is
held in the most fluidly harmonious balance. Every soaring arch of
the architect is maintained by an analogous balance of opposing
thrusts, without which harmoniously maintained struggle, his art,
like the creator of the world's art, would collapse in ruins. For,
in the creation of the forms of art, we see, as in the evolution of
the forms of animal and vegetable life, there is no room for
violence; conflict and resistance go hand in hand with harmony and
balance."*

[* This essay was reprinted in The
Philosophy of Conflict and Other Essays in War-time, 1919.]

It was war-time, and I had in mind no problem of sex but the
absurd misapprehension of militarists and pacifists, each clinging
to a half-truth, which, taken by itself, was not a truth at all,
but false and misleading. I soon realised, however, that the great
principle I had made clear to myself, which covered the facts of
nature and of life, could not fail also to cover the phenomena of
sex. Indeed, since this law of opposing forces in the building up
of the world becomes especially clear in the building up of life,
and the more intense the higher we proceed in the development of
life, it could not fail to apply to sex, and clearly did so apply.
Here in these central phenomena of life we find in the most
emphatic forms that conflict of balanced forces which is implicit
in all life. At the outset we may obscure it. Those phenomena of
courtship with which the sex life begins, not merely in our own
species but in many of the humblest genera of the zoological series
from which we spring, reveals it at once in a typical shape which
symbolises the whole sex-world. Courtship is an art created out of
the opposing play of balanced but oscillatory forces: a tempered
and balanced conflict between the energy of the male and the
resistant opposing energy of the female. If the energy were not
tempered and balanced and there were violence so that one of the
two opposing forces were destroyed, there would be failure, since
the ends of sex demand the equal activity of both forces. But the
failure would be the same if there were no conflict, because, under
natural and normal conditions, without the agitation of conflict,
and the winding up of accumulated force which conflict ensures,
there would not be achieved those dynamic phenomena of tumescence
and detumescence which are, ultimately, the essence of the process
of sex.

When, as among domesticated animals and often among civilised
human beings, the conflict of courtship is attenuated, the process
of sex cannot attain full vigour, and when the process of sex fails
to reach this full vigour, the whole vitality of the creature in
all its manifestations, is diminished. That is so, not only on the
physical plane but also on what we call the spiritual plane. It is
equally so when we take a broader and higher view and look at the
whole complex of sex phenomena as compared with other phenomena.
If, for instance, we compare sexuality with asceticism—the
phenomena of sex indulgence with those of sex abstinence—we
see the same conflict of balanced forces. We cannot well have a
rich human nature without some sexuality; we cannot have a
fortified and self-controlled nature without some asceticism; the
whole art and discipline of the emotional life lies in preserving
that harmonious conflict. And if we rise still higher, and view the
whole emotional life in opposition to the whole intellectual life,
the necessity for the same conflict still remains. Where the finest
life is, sex and culture are perfectly balanced. To desire freedom
from their conflict is to desire annihilation. Conflict is implicit
in the perpetual anabolism and katabolism which make up the
metabolism of life. There is no "antinomy" here; it may rather be
said that we are in the presence of a "nomy," that nomos
which is the principle of the whole universe as we know it, and it
is even specially and beautifully made concrete to us in the
phenomena of sex.

I am far from claiming that this mode of viewing the
phenomena—though I arrived at it for myself and along my own
path—is a new or original mode. Indeed the very fact that I
may claim it to have a basis in the objects of knowledge prevents
it from being a purely subjective attitude, even though it may
correspond to an attitude which is congenial to my own temper of
mind, as one to whom all violence is antipathetic but who feels by
a sort of natural instinct, and has found by experience, that
conflict is implicit in the whole of life. As regards the general
principle, I have but to take up at random a book only published a
week or two ago (Richard Rothschild's Paradoxy) and I read:
"Conflict characterises all art, and the deepest conflicts are
those in which two aspects of the same thing merge." I could not
desire a better statement in a single sentence, and I would merely
add that conflict characterises not only all art but the whole of
our known universe. If I desire evidence as regards the matter
specially before us, I have but to turn to a philosopher invoked by
Professor Del-Negro, Count Keyserling. It is more in place for me
to invoke Keyserling here, for though his doctrine is put into a
statement entirely independent of my conception, it is completely
in accordance with mine and entirely at variance with Dr.
Del-Negro's. Indeed, I regard Keyserling's essay on "The Correct
Statement of the Marriage Problem," in his Book of
Marriage—although at some points I disagree—as
being, on the whole, the best statement of this core of the sex
problem which I have met with. So far from seeing any "antinomy" in
marriage, the contradiction in marriage, as Keyserling sees it, is
a harmony: "Taken in concert," as he puts it, "contradictions act
contra-puntally "; that is to say, the added force harmonises with
the original theme. Or, as he more definitely expresses it,
"marriage corresponds to an elliptical field of force," that is,
with two foci and an interpolar tension, and is "essentially a
state of tension." That is, expressed in another way, precisely the
situation which I see. Indeed, to turn to the architectural image
of life, which more specially appeals to me, we really have the
elliptical arch with its two foci. And if we may thus view the
single central core of sex in the marriage of man and woman, we may
equally see the same tension when we rise to a higher viewpoint,
and take the whole of sexuality into our vision in its opposition
to culture, or whatever we may find as the force which balances
sexuality. "The whole of life," as Keyserling says, "is a state of
tension." There is no "antinomy" here to be solved or removed, and
the question of a "compromise" cannot arise. To destroy the tension
would be to destroy life. Rather is it our business to maintain the
tension at its highest pitch. That tension is life itself. To quote
Keyserling's profound and significant aphorism: "One can only play
on tightened strings."

Again and again Professor Del-Negro appeals to Nietzsche. I fear
that this persistent recurrence must indicate an evil conscience.
Nietzsche, we know, was not consistent; he did not desire to be
consistent. But there are many points at which his attitude is
clear, and one of the clearest is his profound repugnance to that
doctrine of the antinomy beloved by Professor Del-Negro. Nietzsche
regarded the passion for finding antinomies and antitheses as a
metaphysical superstition, due to a lack of insight. He is at the
farthest extreme from Professor Del-Negro, and regards the notion
of contradiction as one to be eradicated. He is absolutely
sceptical of all antitheses. "My desire," he declared, "is to show
the absolute homogeneity of all phenomena," the differentiations
being merely matters of perspective. It is Del-Negro's courage that
we must commend, rather than his discernment, when he appeals to
Nietzsche.

Towards the end, Dr. Del-Negro seems to grow weary of his
antinomious craving for a synthesis, and pursues a theatrical or
histrionic image by calling sex a tragedy. He does not seem to
perceive that his earlier idea of the antinomy demanding a
synthesis, if it is to be translated into theatrical terms, demands
a comedy, not a tragedy, for a comedy admits of a synthesis, but
not a tragedy, unless we view it from the superhuman standpoint of
Fate.

"The greatest thing by far," said Aristotle, "is to be a master
of metaphor." It is quite a long time since Aristotle made that
wise and profound observation, but so far he seems to have made it
in vain. Indeed we might agree with Nietzsche that most of our
solemn "truths," even to-day, are merely a throng of metaphors,
which have lost their living force. The youthful Berkeley had, long
ago, made an observation in his Commonplace Book to much the
same effect, when still in his teens. The vivifying influence of
Vaihinger on thought largely lay in helping us to realise how to
treat the als ab of the metaphor as a living force, and to
understand rightly its significance. Professor Del-Negro, in
abandoning his favourite Hegelian formula of the antithesis and
suddenly gliding into the conception of the world sub specie
theatri, as a solution of the problem of sex, seems to have
been merely adopting an outworn counter of conventional phraseology
(I would say the same of Keyserling, who also introduces the
histrionic word "tragic" in connection with sex); he seems unable
to realise that he is here entering a totally different world of
concepts, and one that is not really suitable to his purpose. I
repeat he would have been better advised, if he insists on the
theatrical image, to say "comic," rather than tragic, for the
conception of comedy can be made accordant with the conception of
an antithesis demanding harmonious solution, but not that of
tragedy.

No question need be raised as to the validity of the theatrical
metaphor in philosophy. All philosophies, it has been argued, must
be based on metaphors. It is many years since Alexander Fraser
showed how true that thesis is, showing how Hegel was obsessed by
the elementary notions of electricity then lately discovered, and
so on; while I have myself pointed out the pyro-technical imagery
which pervades Bergson's philosophy. Shaftesbury was impressed with
the theatrical vision of life, which suited his own constitution,
inapt for an actively real life. Jules de Gaultier has elaborated
in fascinating shapes the conception of the world as an aesthetic
spectacle; and Müller-Freienfels (in his Geheimnisse der
Seele) develops the histrionic view of life. It is a fruitful
metaphor. But it seems only to correspond with the more superficial
phenomena of sex, for, as Nietzsche remarked, the dramatic
self-consciousness of theatricalism renders impossible the effort
after perfection, and scarcely at all with the formula of the
antinomy. I think that Professor Del-Negro would have been more
happily inspired if he had insisted on the heroic, rather than on
the tragic, attitude in the sphere of sex. The tragic protagonist
of the stage is doomed to failure and destruction. But the
protagonist of the sexual struggle is triumphantly carrying on the
life of the world, and handing on—heroically if you
will—to the generation that follows him the immortal torch of
life he has himself received.

To sum up in a word: I find for myself no illumination in the
idea of sex as an antithesis or as a stage tragedy. It is a
conflict—that is to say, a meeting of opposites—but a
conflict that involves a play of forces in harmonious balance. To
guide that conflict skilfully to its highest manifestations is an
art. All our activities are really of the nature of arts. The art
of sex, in its widest and loftiest relationships, is in the most
emphatic degree an art because it penetrates to the biological core
of all life. Like all forms of art, it involves a discipline, a
discipline which may be as painful as that of the dancer or as
complicated as that of the architect, and the achievement of which
may involve heroism, with the high tension that heroism demands,
and with its satisfaction and its joy.

It must not be supposed that in setting forth my own conception
of the philosophy of sex, I have desired to overthrow that of
Professor Del-Negro. On the contrary, I welcome his statement.

It is not easy to set up one's own argument unless one has in
view another argument against which to measure it. We must be
grateful to Professor Del-Negro for his attractive and stimulating
essay.

XXV. THE FUTURE OF RELIGION

This review of SOCIAL SUBSTANCE OF RELIGION: AN ESSAY ON THE
EVOLUTION OF RELIGION, appeared in the WEEK-END REVIEW for 18th
July 1931.

IN a recent "Interpretation of Christian History," Lewis
Browne's Since Calvary, the plight of the modern masses over
religion is lucidly set forth. A movement of which the war was the
symbol, and even largely the motive force, has split the crowd into
two sections: on the one hand those who are still anxious to clutch
something of the old faith and have become fanatical obscurantists,
"Fundamentalists," as they are called in America if Protestants,
and "Reactionaries" if Catholic; on the other hand those who,
contentedly or discontentedly, drift at random, feeling themselves
at most mere "crumbs of stellar dust." So that on the one side
religion to-day among the masses is degraded; on the other side it
has no existence at all.

That is a situation which cannot fail to interest those who
meditate on the deeper problems of the time. Mr. Gerald Heard,
widely known since his Ascent of Humanity as one of the
original thinkers of our day, here attempts to deal with it. He is
not content with the facile economic solutions which satisfied the
last generation; he seeks an interpretation, where many of us will
be willing to accompany him, in psychology. The result is a volume
full of suggestion, even if, as the author acknowledges, he is
putting forward "a very tentative hypothesis."

Criticism may, indeed, arise over an assumption made in the
opening chapter: "The Problem: Conflict." As Mr. Heard views it,
that is indeed the problem: "Conflict," and, as he says, its
"cure." But he never defines what he means by "conflict." It
becomes for him an indefinable obsession from which, at all costs,
escape must be found. Yet it is not difficult to define "conflict,"
and when defined and faced it need not seem a bogey. Speaking as
one who has elsewhere put forth a "Philosophy of Conflict," I would
say that—taken in its central sense, which is not only
psychological but widely biological—conflict is the meeting
of two opposed forces. In its normal forms such conflict is
balanced, because with the destruction of one of the forces the
conflict would fall; in its abnormal forms the balance ceases to be
harmonious and we have all sorts of violent and destructive
phenomena varying with the medium: disease, insanity, revolution,
war, etc. We must concentrate our attention on its normal forms to
realise that all life is essentially a conflict of opposing forces;
metabolism, as the physiologist may say, is the conflict between
anabolism and katabolism; the heart, similarly, is alive by the
perpetual conflict between its diastole and its systole. All growth
takes place under resistance, and without it there would be no
life. The movement of life in a spiral, which Mr. Heard has
elsewhere emphasised, is due to resistance, a conflict between
opposing forces. This is not only true of life in Nature but also
of life in art. "One can only play on tightened strings." This is
beautifully shown in the fundamental arts of dancing and building,
where the conflict is maintained, here by the opposing tension of
muscles and there by the opposing thrusts of piers. Without that
conflict the dancer would fall and the building collapse. Conflict
is life and beauty and joy. Mr. Heard incautiously calls for its
"cure." The "cure" of conflict is death.

Although he occupies an independent position in relation to the
psycho-analysts, Mr. Heard seems to have been misled by them into
concentrating his attention on the abnormal forms of conflict. Mr.
Heard's main problem is, however, in the normal field, and when we
survey the phenomena of conflict here we find the ordinary
frequency curve, with the commonplace easy-going mass in the middle
and at one end a minority in whom the elements of conflict are weak
and unbalanced, so that they succumb to insanity, suicide, crime,
or what not; while at the other end is another minority in whom
those elements are strong yet well-balanced, so that they rise to
heights of character, talent, or genius. Conflict, as Mr. Heard
recognises, is often strong among savages. The people described
with so much insight and skill by Margaret Mead in Growing up in
New Guinea live under a state of repression and perpetual
puritanic regulation, which must mean endless conflicts. What marks
civilisation is the higher quality and strength of the hereditary
elements involved, not the presence of conflict. Even if a work of
human art, such as a cathedral, could become conscious and vocal,
it would tell us of stresses which, as in recent years at St.
Paul's, might sometimes be acutely painful.

Yet it remains legitimate to seek origins for the various forms
of conflict essential to life. One such primitive conflict here
discussed is between the family and the group, at first in the form
of father-right and mother-right, and Mr. Heard argues that these
two formative influences of civilisation were early in conflict. He
believes that in this he is going against some anthropologists,
notably Dr. Malinowski, but there seems a little misunderstanding
here. In what he regards as the first full account of his position,
Malinowski states that over-emphasis on the family is as erroneous
as over-emphasis on the group, since they are complementary and
work side by side; and that mother-right and father-right, though
not stages of culture, may each at some period stand out more
conspicuously than the other. There is no absolute "veto" here on
Mr. Heard's view, which, indeed, resolves itself ultimately into
the conflict, always manifest or latent, between the individual and
society.

"I know a man," so I lately read, "whose face becomes the face
of an assassin at the very mention of the word 'community.'" The
gentleman in question was certainly not Mr. Heard, and it is to be
hoped that they may never meet. This book is written to glorify
"community," in which word the "social substance of religion" may
be summed up. We must not here think of the churches we know. Mr.
Heard will have none of them: "When we hear the word Gospel,
hackneyed, dreadly contemptible, we can hear all the tragedy of Man
"; and he scarcely refers more than once to Jesus, whom he
dismisses as "inenarrable," although he admits an element of value
in Christianity and is perhaps himself more of a Christian than he
knows. Popular religion, indeed, is to him merely a drug, and not
even opium, but mescal, which he regards as much more poisonous,
"that maddening drug to induce an intoxicated and desperate
ecstasy," which seems to indicate that Mr. Hoard's experiences of
Echinocactus Williamsii have been much less happy than were
mine thirty years ago. At the same time, and at the other extreme,
he rejects, as a morbid deviation, that mysticism which many would
regard as the core of religion with its affirmation: "The Kingdom
of Heaven is within you." That is too individualistic for Mr.
Heard. At the same time he admires George Fox and regards Quakerism
as the nearest approach yet made to the communistic "Charitism" he
himself proclaims as the religion of the future, though he believes
that Quakerism failed, largely, it seems, by admitting marriage and
the family, for Mr. Heard seeks to depreciate all the
manifestations of sex. Yet Fox was a genuine mystic; when the call
came he shunned men and went into the orchards and the fields; the
community that grew around him was later and secondary. It is
usually so with the men of religion; and the community which grows
around the mystic's ideal debases it. I know people who have
eagerly entered a community, saying, with William Morris,
"Fellowship is Heaven," and have come out of it saying, "Fellowship
is Hell." Mr. Heard's religion of the future, however, not only
suppresses all individuality but only begins with the group. It
thus resembles the Bolshevik religion of Leninism, but otherwise is
the reverse of it, a sort of inverted Leninism, for that is the
religion of hate, and the gospel of "Charisma" will be the religion
of love, of universal reconciliation.

It would require much space to follow Mr. Heard over all the
ground covered by his fertile invention. Enough has been said to
indicate that this challenging and stimulating book, however
questionable, cannot be neglected by those who are concerned with
the problems of the human spirit to-day.

XXVI. THE EONIST

This article was written early in 1932 for an American
journal, but found by the editor to be "too strong." So it is
published here for the first time, in order that the reader may be
able to judge for himself how far its strength is above proof.

SEVERAL letters have reached me from unknown correspondents with
regard to a sentence of eighteen months' imprisonment with hard
labour lately passed on a young man at the Leeds Assizes. The
report of the trial is not so clear as it might be, though the
newspapers describe it in the largest type as "amazing," and the
judge seems never to have heard of such a case before. The charge,
which was of "indecency," set forth that this youth, Augustine Hull
by name, had for six months past dressed as a woman and during that
period been courted by another young workman whom he agreed to
marry, though before the wedding day he disappeared, thus
inflicting on the would-be bridegroom what the judge denounced as
"a cruel wrong."

My correspondents, shocked at the sentence, wrote to me because
they knew that this anomaly was not so amazing as the judge and the
journalists supposed, and that I have written of it at length.

It is an anomaly which in Germany is called Transvestism or
cross-dressing, but which I term Eonism, because much more than
cross-dressing is involved, and the mental disposition may exist
without even the wish for any change of dress. The name Eonism
indicates an origin from the Chevalier d'Eon, who was the most
noted representative of this anomaly more than a century ago, and
played a conspicuous part in European history and diplomacy as the
trusted agent of kings and statesmen. His actual sex was at the
time disputed, but he was really a man who preferred to live as a
woman, and so in old age died in London. These people are
frequently, like the Chevalier d'Eon, of high character and
distinguished ability and normal in other respects, often devoted
husbands and affectionate fathers. But they would rather be mothers
than fathers, they feel like women, they share the tastes of women,
and most of them, not all, delight to indulge, when they can do so
without detection, in the refinements of the feminine toilette. At
the present time I know one such who, for considerable periods,
both in America and in England, has lived as a woman, with a woman
friend who was in the secret, leading an entirely decorous and
honourable life; dressed as a man, he appears normal, robust, and
masculine; but as a woman he never betrays his sex, and is indeed
said to be more like a woman, more "ladylike" in his ways, than the
average woman.

Augustine Hull is evidently a more radical example of this
anomaly. He is a simple workman, a colliery haulage hand, belonging
to a very poor family. But from early childhood he felt like a
girl, he played with girls' toys, and, as he grew older, was
accustomed to do all the feminine tasks of housework. He takes
girls' parts at theatricals; it gratifies him to wear women's
clothes and he feels at home in them. More than that: even in male
costume he looks like a girl, is slight and feminine in build, and
with a feminine voice. So much is he like a girl that at the age of
seventeen, when returning from church one Sunday morning in
ordinary male attire, he was arrested by the police, taken to the
station and stripped, because he was supposed to be a girl
masquerading as a man.

To all well-instructed people the case is simple. It was
evidently so to the two medical witnesses who were called, one a
psycho-analyst and the other the prison surgeon. But their evidence
went for nothing. The judge pronounced his sentence of eighteen
months' hard labour, and when the case was carried to the Court of
Appeal, the judge of that court dismissed the appeal in a few brief
remarks which concluded with the statement that he "did not
consider the sentence a day too much."

In Germany and some other countries of the continent of Europe a
more reasonable attitude towards the eonist tends on the whole to
prevail. It is beginning to be acknowledged that a genuine taste
for cross-dressing, whether in a man or in a woman, provided that
it leads to no public disturbance of order, is not properly a
matter for police interference. There is a tendency for the police
to view it with tacit acceptance, and medico-legal experts have
even argued that police permits should be issued in these cases,
valid during good behaviour. It is stated that the two countries in
which the harshest and most antiquated attitude towards the eonist
still prevails are England and the United States. That is my reason
for bringing forward the matter here.

Four centuries ago, in the city of Basel, a cock was solemnly
tried and publicly burnt alive in the market-place for the
unnatural crime of laying an egg. To-day we know that there was
here nothing unnatural. Sex depends on the balance of the
hormone-producing glands, and that balance sometimes results in
states that are naturally inter-sexual. We now understand this when
cocks and hens are concerned. We shall some day understand it a
little better where our own fellow-creatures are concerned. Until
then it might be as well to avoid treating them in the spirit in
which our ancestors treated the cock that laid an egg.

XXVII. CREATING A NEW SPAIN

This article appeared in the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE MAGAZINE
for 28th February 1932.

SOME of us who know and love Spain have long looked forward to
the constitutional changes which would at length bring its people
into line with the other nations of our civilisation. No country
can afford to live indefinitely on the treasures of however
splendid a past. Moreover, a country which has once made
magnificent contributions to human civilisation, and continues to
retain the same racial constitution (unlike, for instance, Greece,
where the population has been profoundly modified), may reasonably
be expected to retain reserves of force. So that, as Professor
Fleure remarked some years ago, even the backwardness of Spain,
with the unemployed energies it implies, may ultimately prove an
advantage, and with the re-establishment of favourable conditions
Spain again make precious contributions, even if in different form,
to the sum of human achievement. How Spain would succeed in
bringing about these conditions was not clear to us, whether by
reforming the Monarchy or by sweeping it away. We know to-day. We
could hardly have known beforehand that the good sense of King and
people alike would enable the Spanish Revolution to take place so
completely, and yet so peacefully, that it was possible to describe
the first act of this great political drama as "a sort of
picnic."

It has lost that character since, as we might expect if we
remember the usual course of revolutions, as well illustrated by
Russia. Many years before that Revolution I was accustomed to
associate Russia and Spain: both mainly agricultural, both so held
captive by the traditions of the past that to enter either country
was to be taken back to mediaeval times, both with an uneducated
mass-population, yet both, one felt, beyond any of the other chief
countries of Europe, holding great reserves of force. Rut there one
came upon a contrast: even though their mood might be the same, and
the Nichevo of Russia answer to the Manana of Spain, the
strength of Russia was that of an enormous child with no past but a
vast future; the strength of Spain could only be that of renewed
maturity. It is to these longer traditions and more varied
political experiences of Spain that we may doubtless attribute the
more nonchalant attitude of Spain towards revolution. Spain is not
young enough to cherish the magnificent expectations of Russia.

Yet it is precisely in its age that the possibilities of clash
lie, for in Spain every movement of germinating life has to break
through a peculiarly hard shell of ancient tradition. There is, in
Spain, as many have pointed out, always the ancient Don Quixote,
chivalrous and high-spirited indeed, but moulded on the pattern of
a past that is dead, and unable to accept or even to perceive the
facts of the living present; and there is the more modern Sancho
Panza, a realist, quite alive to the novelties of the modern world,
and willing to accommodate himself to them. Theoretically, and in
practice during normal times, these two great figures are
harmoniously complementary to each other. But in a revolution there
cannot well fail soon to be a clash. Spain has been the last great
Catholic country of Europe; the Church has held unquestioned and
almost unbroken sway not only in its own house but in the affairs
of the country; it has been free to educate—so far as it
chose to educate at all—the whole nation in its own mediaeval
code, and to suppress all others. But even though devout crowds
flock to the churches, everyone who is acquainted with the Spanish
people knows how, not only among the men of distinguished
intellect, but among the masses, there has long been a profound
though usually quiet scepticism, the spirit of Sancho Panza
reacting against the ancient and outworn Quixotry.

That clash has been the great peril of the young Republic of
Spain. The Spanish are naturally tolerant, as an individualistic
people is prone to be. It is part of the humanity of the Spanish
temper. Of all great national writers, Cervantes is the most
unfailingly humane, even towards such enemies of his land as the
English; and it is a typical Spanish trait that one of the first
acts of a Republican Government is to order a supply of high-power
pumps to replace the barbarous method of using fire-arms to
disperse disorderly mobs. Even in far ancient days there was a
remarkable degree of tolerance in Spain, and the first leaders of
the Revolution, with Zamora, himself a liberal Catholic, at the
head, proposed to establish toleration for all Spaniards alike. But
it is the proud boast of the Church that it never changes. So it
comes about that the Revolution in its course opened the way to
reaction, for intolerance breeds counter-intolerance. Hence the
burning of churches and monasteries by the mob, whom at first none
sought to hold back. The Church thus reaped what it had sown. Now a
middle course seems to be in course of establishment. The
Jesuits—though intellectually a vigorous and active element
in Spain—are to be expelled, as they have been before, even
in Spain, and less humanely than on the present occasion; education
is taken out of the hands of the Church and becomes everywhere the
care of the State. Church property is put under State control, and
all religious creeds are to be tolerated.

If we put aside this vexed question of the Church, which cannot
fail to be a source of trouble in a land where Catholicism has been
so deeply rooted, the great reforms now being effected must meet
with unqualified applause. If some of them may still seem
premature, others are long overdue.

Of such is certainly a large measure of Home Rule for Catalonia.
Local patriotism is strong in Spain and various regions may be
inclined to desire some degree of self-government. But the case of
Catalonia has always been special. The Catalans are a people of
different race and different temper who live at a quicker pace than
the true Spaniards and exert a greater activity. It is easy to
understand their impatient resentment of the antique bonds with
which the central authority of Madrid had sought to constrain them.
One who is a lover of Catalonia as well as of Spain can only view
with satisfaction the end of a long and mischievous friction.
Harmony between Barcelona and Madrid will be as helpful for Spain
as for Catalonia.

That is a local question. The changes now taking place in Spain
are, for a large part, such as concern the whole civilised world,
for they represent a sudden attempt to realise ideals which society
elsewhere is slowly seeking, and has only here and there achieved.
If that must be admitted, those of us who live in more slowly
moving countries may, at all events, claim that our slow progress
is sounder and more thorough, not accompanied by the dangerous
friction which always marks speed.

However that may be, looked at all round, Spain seems to many
to-day, as someone has expressed it, the one bright spot in Europe.
It is too early to be optimistic. But many great reforms which
other countries are only slowly reaching have been established by
the decisions of a Cortes which, on the surface at all events, has
been almost unanimous, though it has not been representative of
every section of the population by the partial abstention of
Conservatives and Monarchists from the elections. The new
Constitution takes large ground in subordinating the entire wealth
of the country to "the interest of national economy," not thereby
meaning confiscation without compensation, but assuming the right
to expropriate private property, to nationalise public services,
and to direct industries into the lines of national interest. All
this is what modern States are to-day tentatively trying to do; but
here for the first time the right to socialisation has been
definitively affirmed in the terms of the Constitution.

On the more domestic side of life the changes effected have been
of a real revolutionary character. The legal distinction between
legitimate and illegitimate children has been abolished; divorce
has been made easy for either party; women enjoy the same legal
status as men, and are equally entitled to the vote. Already there
is a woman in the Government, and one or two women in the
Cortes.

This change in the status of women is significant. Women have
always been influential in Spain, and there have been many
remarkable personalities among them, from the throne downward. But
in legal restraints, in formal subjection to their husbands, and in
social conventions, their position has remained mediaeval to a
degree scarcely known in other civilised lands.

This liberation of women may well prove a significant and
influential factor in the new life of Spain. To me it has seemed
that in energy and character Spanish women are often superior to
their men. To bring their fine qualities into direct contact with
public life seems to promise the introduction of an invigorating
element. What it may mean has been brought home to me by contact
through correspondence with a young Spanish woman who—though
far indeed from being an average sample of her race and
sex—appears as a marvellous representative of Spanish
womanhood. She was born a few months after the outbreak of the
Great War, and is now a qualified lawyer—the youngest lawyer
in Spain—nor is that, by any means, the only fact that makes
her significant. She is to-day, at the age of seventeen, the author
of eight or nine books of from seventy to over three hundred pages,
all published during less than two years. Here are some of the
titles: The Eugenic Problem (this is the earliest, and a
revised and enlarged edition has now been published), The Sexual
Revolution, Sexual Education, The Sexual Problem Treated by a
Spanish Woman, The Sexual Rebellion of Youth, The Limitation of
Offspring. A formidable series of books, it will be seen, even
judged by the titles, for anyone to write, but when we remember
that they have been written by a girl, only just seventeen years of
age, living alone with her mother in a suburb of Madrid, we are
carried far beyond the limits of ordinary experience.

It is not merely the number and the titles of the books but
their quality which is astonishing. We find in them little or
nothing of the exalted verbal eloquence to which the beautiful
Spanish tongue so easily lends itself. The style of these books is
simple, clear, and vigorous, with a firm grasp of the
arguments—though we feel the presence of an attractive
personality behind—and with an extraordinary breadth of
culture, an intimate knowledge of what is being thought and done in
the world, especially in England and the United States, about the
subjects she is treating. Nor are this girl's activities confined
to study and writing. Since she was fourteen (shortly after
entering the University) she has been a Socialist, and for some
time past an active worker for the party, going from town to town
to organise groups, and delivering lectures. She has lately been
giving in Madrid a series of lectures on the subject of Jesus,
introducing ideas of the modern kind not likely to be acceptable by
the Catholic Church, to which she is entirely hostile, although she
recognises the right of private judgment; and these lectures, as I
have seen by long newspaper reports, have been crowded, even the
stairways leading to the hall where they were delivered.

Hildegart, the only name this wonderful girl desires to be known
by in public or in private, received the name at birth from her
mother and her aunt (who had lived much in Germany). It is evident
that she has been carefully reared, and her mother, to whom she
owes much, seems only less remarkable than herself. Hildegart
possesses various accomplishments outside the work to which she is
specially devoting herself; she has a mastery of several languages,
including Latin, is drawn to music, and now that her legal training
is ended, she is studying medicine and philosophy until the legal
age to practise publicly as a lawyer. She remains simple and
natural, and in her photograph appears still with the dark,
girlish, corkscrew curls, a mature face indeed, but reposefully
strong and sweet. One thinks of Valera's description of the typical
Spanish woman, "angelic but robust."

A land which can still produce even one woman of the spirit and
fibre of Hildegart is full of promise for the world.